by Josh Barkan
My mother peers into the doorway and she says, “Gordi. I am going to come each day to school and pick you up. I will take you home each day. What are you running from? Whatever it is, you can’t run forever. Whoever it is, they’ll get you, if I don’t pick you up. I will come for you every day.”
I don’t respond. They are the sweetest words my mother could say. But nothing can save me, unless I can find a watch that has disappeared. No, I must get a gun.
—
When I think of what happened to my mother, later in this story, I wonder what would have happened if I had never made the choice to look for a gun. What if I hadn’t been so obsessed with the idea of finding the piece of deadly metal? What if I hadn’t thought that a gun could solve all my problems? Certainly, I never would have ended up in the U.S., and certainly I would not have had to see the initial indignity my mother was brought to. But when you are twelve and a life-or-death situation seems to be knocking at your door, you knock back, seeking to protect yourself in any way you can. So I took all my money out of my piggy bank and jar, and, since that wasn’t enough, I took money from a can where I knew my mother was storing up money for a rainy day, and I went to try to buy a gun.
My mother had been picking me up at school for two weeks when I went. She came like clockwork, waiting at the front door a few minutes before the final bell of the day rang. Despite the protestations of my math teacher and his stern warnings, and despite the fact I was failing his class more and more, I would leave early and hurry out to the car, where my mother would meet me where she was waiting with the motor running, and she would receive me like a mother back into the womb, protecting me as if she could be a large umbrella keeping me from the rain. I would tell her, “Mom, this cannot go on forever. You know that.”
And she would say to me, “Forever is made up of individual points, one by one, and if you are good today, then things will work out in the end.”
Those two weeks were, in some ways, the happiest of my life, in that I could see how much my mother truly loved me. Every child wants to believe their mother really loves them, wants to believe their mother loves them even more than their mother loves their father, that they are, deep down inside, the most important thing in the world to their mother, but few get the chance to know so clearly the complete devotion of a mother as I did in those days my mother picked me up from school.
It was like walking among a graveyard of the dead. El Farito was outside sometimes, or other members of his gang, and once they threw a rotten egg at the windshield after my mother had taken me safe into the car. Another time, one of the tires was punched flat, mysteriously, while my mother waited for me in the car. It would have been too dangerous for us to get out of the car to change the tire, so my mother drove home with only three of the wheels working, the other flapping against the ground, the tire air that was missing letting me know this couldn’t continue much longer.
So I went to el Señor López’s house. Señor López had been a police officer in his younger days. It might seem like surely I should have known I should try to buy a gun from someone much more nefarious, and I did know that, but I also knew I didn’t really have enough money to buy a gun on the real black market. The cost of a gun was not the price itself, it was the price of the risk the seller was taking in selling a gun to someone. If someone was a professional crook, no one thought twice selling the weapon to them, because they knew that person would never lead the authorities back to them. But who wants to sell a gun to a chubby twelve-year-old who stands out like an innocent baby in a field of violence? The seller knows he will be traced to the boy who buys the gun in no time at all, when the foolish, innocent-looking child fails to use the gun properly. So when I had tried to buy a gun on the black market, at first, speaking to people on the street corners who I knew could sell me a weapon, everyone told me, “It will never happen, Gordi. You’re just a kid. You’re just a punk.”
In my desperation, I went to el Señor López. He was eighty years old, and I told him El Farito was chasing me. The old man lived above a small bodega where they sold rice and eggs and other staples, and he had nothing to do, now that he was old, except to watch the television with the volume cranked up too loud.
“Why don’t you go to the police?” he said. “They can help you.”
“Excuse me, Señor López, but you know the police will not believe me if I tell them my life is in danger because someone took El Farito’s watch. To them this will seem like nothing. To them, I am just a flea, a tiny story while there are big crimes going on. But for me, I know that if I don’t get this gun, El Farito and his gang are going to kill me.”
“How much money do you have?”
I laid out all of the money from the piggy bank, jar, and my mother’s can on his grimy kitchen table. He was turning blind in his old age. He fingered the bags of coins, and then he fingered the bills I had taken from my mother. He seemed to retreat into the cloud of sound coming out of the TV, some cop show, a rerun of Starsky & Hutch. I thought of taking all my money back and running to find someone else. This old man was useless to me, and even as a twelve-year-old I felt he was wasting my time, but then he moved around his kitchen, feeling his way in the dim fluorescent light that harshly lit up his house. He went to his back bedroom, and I watched him crouch beneath his bed. He rummaged around, pulling out stacks of old, musty girlie magazines that he kept and must have once masturbated to, and from behind the magazines, wrapped in a piece of worn red velvet, pulled out a gun.
“This isn’t a toy,” he told me as he unwrapped it. He put the gun on the bed and I wanted to grab it. The gun looked like a miracle machine that would save me. “Do you know how to use this?”
“Yes, of course I do,” I lied.
“Of course you don’t,” he said. He took out six bullets and put them into the police revolver. It had a thick, black plastic handle, with harsh texture; it felt like a handle that had been held firmly to lord it over criminals and to make sure Mr. López received his small bribes when he was a police officer, as almost all the cops took bribes to survive.
He put the bullets in the gun and spun the barrel of the revolver. He took the bullets out again. Then he had me put them in one by one. I tried to spin the revolver as he had, and the metal in the barrel seemed like lead in my hands compared to in his. The barrel barely moved.
“Don’t get cocky with this gun. You’re not a cowboy. Use this only in the worst cases, in the very last instance, if you have to. A gun is only as strong and smart as the person carrying it. If you try to be a show-off with this, I guarantee they will get you in two seconds flat. Hide the gun in your pant leg. And only if you absolutely need it, take it out.”
He was telling me much more wisdom than I could know. The only thing I saw was what felt to me like my salvation. I held the gun, and the weight of the machine seemed to me to offer strength and power and definite protection. I would have kissed Señor López if it weren’t so inappropriate. So I simply told him I would bring him more money every week for the next four weeks, as we’d agreed, since the money I had was insufficient.
—
There is a long gash that runs down my right arm. The gash is hidden under my tuxedo when I play the bass in orchestra concerts, but the gash is always there. It is something music cannot hide. Playing music, as I hold my bow, I can only represent the scar of my body in the slow, sad sections when the plaintive sound of the bass overwhelms the audience, in those long, sighing underlying interludes which a great composer like Beethoven gives a bass player to remind the audience that sorrow is the underlying note of a life as it seeks higher ground.
Three days before I escaped from Mexico with my mother, I met El Farito and four other members of his gang out on the soccer field where the watch had first disappeared. One of the shortcuts home from school was to run out back to the soccer field and jump over a fence at the end of the field, behind the goal where I had defended my team when the watch had disappeared. Jumping down the
fence, hanging in the air and then jumping down a concrete wall, saved a couple of minutes on the way hurrying home. This was the first day my mother had failed to come get me. She failed because she had to be in her school late that day to meet the parents of her students, and if she didn’t stay at work she would lose her job.
So I was left to run home, on my own, that day. I brought the gun with me. I had the gun with me every day since I had bought it. The gun was heavy and must have made my pant leg look unusual to anyone who saw me, but I tried to hide it completely. I was out on the soccer field hurrying, at first, toward the back chain-link fence to climb up it, when the rush of the game of soccer that I loved, so much, overtook me. For a second, rather than hurrying on my way, I put myself in the goal to feel the thrill of the space that I wanted to defend. I put my hands in the air, pretending I was stopping balls. I felt the urge to jump from side to side, leaping toward the corners, as I had once jumped every afternoon and as I hadn’t done since the day El Farito’s watch had disappeared. It was impossible to jump with the weight of the gun in my pants. So I took out the gun, after looking around to see if anyone was coming, and I saw no one. I put the gun in the back of the net, where the watches had been the day they had taken the watch from El Farito. The net was still torn. It was a pitiful net, with holes as large as grapefruits, and the orange netting loose in its fibers like an old net that has been used too many years on worn-out ships at sea. But to me, in that moment, I felt like Schumacher, who had captained the German soccer team in the World Cup. I jumped high to the upper left and felt my body fall to the ground, pretending I had snatched the ball. I got up, dusted the dirt off my thighs, slapping my legs, crouching in the pose of a great fútbol player ready to block a penalty kick in the finals of the World Cup. The crowd chanted my name, “Gordi, Gordi, Gordi!” and I looked out at the wide plain of dirt and imagined the ball coming high and straight at me. And it was in that moment of pure fantasy that I lost sense of time, until in front of me, instead of my fantasy kicker, El Farito and four of his gang members were out on the field. I will never know where they came from, because it seems I should have seen them before they could get so close. By the time I saw them, they were only twenty yards away. I turned and reached for my gun. I didn’t have time to think. I turned toward them and fired the gun, but I had no idea what I was doing and the bullet went nowhere near any of them. The loud clap of the gun surprised me. I shot again, and the next bullet went further into nowhere. I saw a ping of dust in the distance. The bullet must have hit the ground. The young men ran up to me. I shot again and hit the arm of one of the boys and he grabbed his arm, but he was in no mortal danger. And the next thing I knew I was on the ground and one of the boys had a machete, and they held the hand I had held the gun in, the gun now in El Farito’s hand. And he said to me, “Where the fuck did you get this gun, you idiot? You don’t even know how to fire this weapon. You are going to be in our gang now. But not before we teach you a lesson…Cut his arm,” he told one of the gang members. “Let him know he will always be a fucking idiot. From now on, if you can live, you are going to do whatever I tell you. That’s your payment for the watch. You are going to be one of the Nacos and you are going to tell your mother you don’t belong to her anymore. You’re a man now. Tell your mother you’re not a baby anymore. Watching her come to pick you up in her car, it’s such a pathetic sight to see.” He raised his hand and held it in the air. The boy with the machete raised his blade in unison with El Farito. El Farito threw his hand down at the ground, where I was pinned by two of the boys. The one who had been shot was barely bleeding, barely grazed. And I saw the blade, as I looked up at the blue sky, which made it seem like the day was as pure as it could be, but was blue in the way of someone who feels they are going to die and be sucked up into the heavens, and out of that blue sky I will never forget seeing, as if in slow motion the black metal blade, thick and wide like a blunt club yet sharp at the edge coming down into my arm, a harsh swack, a smack and slice that caused blood to leap out of my arm, a gash halfway into my arm until it was stopped at the bone. They left me lying on the field, bleeding to death, a future Naco if I could survive, a dead man if I could not.
I still cry when I see that scar, the thick crude stitching up my arm, the long gash that never leaves me. I passed out soon after they cut me, after they looked down at me, laughing, the last image I can remember before I lost consciousness. The dust of the field floated around them, it crept into my wound as blood pulsed out onto the dirt and as I tried to close my hand, reaching for the revolver I no longer had, a phantom reaction, reaching for the weapon I had thought would protect me.
The door to the embassy loomed like a gaping maw before me, Marisa—Gordi is my son—in downtown Mexico City. I had traveled first by one of the small peseros, which look like small buses, and then by a real bus for two hours to get to the building along the Avenida Reforma. The gang in the neighborhood had spray-painted the car with Gordi’s name and had slashed a line over his name. They had punched out all the tires. They had spray-painted the house. Gordi’s body had been delivered to me by a nurse from his school, with a lone police officer. I had shouted at them that they should have brought him to a hospital first. What were they thinking? But they told me that if they had taken the time to take him to the hospital he might have died on the way, and the local hospital did not like to get involved with the gang fights. Sometimes they let patients die, intentionally, to avoid having the fighting infiltrate into the building. It was crazy having a hospital that could deny service to its own people. It was certainly illegal to do so. But who was there to check anyone was following the law? The law was what any hospital administrator decided. The choice of whether a gang member who was hurt lived or died could be made by a resident at the hospital in the middle of the night, on a whim. So the nurse had put a tourniquet on his arm and brought my Gordi to me.
The nurse was a young woman, no older than twenty-five, and she stayed in the house beside Gordi, checking his wound, putting on fresh strips of bedsheets that she wrapped around his arm, as she removed all but the tourniquet. I knew Gordi didn’t believe in God—he had told me so, once, such a strange thing for a young boy to claim to know at such a young age—so I went for my own candles with the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe to burn around his bed inside the house. In the first hours he was home, he didn’t know who I was. He barely could identify anyone, the nurse, or my husband.
“We can’t keep him here,” my husband said. “He’ll die and he’ll bring the gang into this house.”
The nurse said, “Señor, if he goes outside now, he will definitely die. He will not be able to take being transported to a hospital. Let him rest.”
“Who knows what kind of criminal activity he has become involved in?” my husband said. “He has brought near death for all of us into the house.”
“Oh, shut up, José Manuel,” I told him. “He’s just a boy, for crying out loud. He’s a boy. They have hurt my boy!” I kneeled down by the side of Gordi and stroked his head. How could they do this to my boy? My boy. My boy!
“Then act like his mother and find a way out of this trap. Do something,” José Manuel said. He was nervous and said he was going to look for a gun to protect us.
“A gun?” I said. “The last thing we need is more guns. Can’t you see Gordi’s gun got him into this trouble to begin with?”
“I’m going to get a gun,” he said, again. And he left the house with me imploring him not to do so.
The nurse told me she would look after Gordi, she would protect him, and I went upstairs and put on my best clothes and lipstick and looked for all my money, which was less than there had been in the jar where I normally kept it. I realized Gordi must have taken some of the money to buy the gun. There were no reserves to fall back on. There was nothing except my ability to persuade, I knew, and I made the lipstick shine brighter on my lips and ironed my dress before I went to catch the pesero and bus. It was 4 a.m. and we had been
up all night with the nurse and in a vigil with Gordi, and José Manuel had just left. I looked into the mirror and asked God to help me and made the sign of the cross. There was only one solution I could think of—to fly away, to go to America, to get the hell out of this neighborhood, to leave El Farito and the gangs and the cancer of Iztapalapa. We should have gone before, I blamed myself. I should have known to get Gordi out of his school, before. My sweet, my love. I went into the room and ran my hand across his face, touching his round cheeks and nose and the soft skin of his forehead and felt his slow breathing in and out, so shallow, I could have no certainty he would still be alive when I came back, but the only chance he would live not only for another few hours, but for days, and weeks and months and years into the future, was to go and flee like any other refugee I had ever seen, or the women of World War II holding their arms up in the air crying over the spilled blood of their husbands, their soldiers, and knowing they had to uproot themselves from their farms and go, go, go.
So I went in the dark of the early morning, catching a pesero crammed with the people of the neighborhood, the muchachas that had to travel far across the city to get to the private homes where they worked, far away across the metropolis. They said little on the pesero in the morning, too tired to chat in the way they would chat coming home. A thin, tiny wisp of a light burned from the ceiling of the bus, the bodies crowded together, even at that early hour, and I made my way until I stood in front of the security gate of the American embassy, where the guards put me in a line, with others who waited, each like a begging ghost in the dawn as it lifted, against a snaking wall, each with hopes, until after a very long wait, it was finally 9 a.m. and the line began to move toward the large metal detector at the front, and white doors that reflected like a mirror back at all of us the hopes we felt and the barrier of the glass.