My muscles felt weak and droopy. I thought I was going to pass out, but then I heard her crying, and when I speeded over to her, her mouth was fluttering. Tears sprouted from her eyes and leaked down past her ears, but this only made me laugh; my heart felt like it was being squeezed between two hands; joy and grief pressing and unpressing.
As she lay there on the floor, sucking air, I said, “Pedi, Pedi. Shhh, shhh!!!” My hands were jittering, as if tied to puppet strings, and my voice leaked through a wet sponge. I stopped to massage my cheeks, thawing them little by little.
If Mom had seen what happened, all the wrinkles on her face would have snapped shut. But she hadn’t. No one had, not even Pedi, really. She hardly knew what happened.
I hid the rifle back in the closet right away, and after calming my mind down and staunching Pedi’s crying, I put her back to sleep on the living room couch. That’s when Magda came home. I turned on the TV fast and pretended to watch an old John Wayne movie.
Magda was glowing with perspiration and breathing in little gulps of air when she walked through the door. She took off her earrings and looked at me. Her hair was mashed down in the back and she was trying to fluff it with her fingers. “Did anybody come?”
“No.”
“What about Pedi, did she cry?”
“No.”
The TV was buzzing a loud, comforting current of electricity. Magda tilted her head around in a swivel, dabbing at stray hair. She went over to the TV and turned it off just as John Wayne, in the midst of squiggles, was dying on a bulldozer. The humming stopped, but the sound buzzed in the air before the current finally died away. “What was that noise a little while ago?” she asked.
“Why’s your hair all messed up?”
“Well, not that it’s any of your business, but there’s a lot of wind out there you know.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah!” She pursed her lips and tugged menacingly at a tuft of my hair. “If you’re thinking of telling any lies to Mom about me, you better think again.” She gave my hair a yank and held on with a twisting pinch. “Do you hear me!?”
“Hear what?” Mom said, coming in through the door. She had a bag of groceries under her arm. “Did he hear what?”
Magda quickly let go my hair. Seeing her dressed like she was, and me with my face rubbery, Mom was suspicious.
“Nothing’s going on, Mom. Manny’s just being a pest, that’s all,” she said, sidling up against me. She wanted me to know that she’d give me pain if I spilled my guts.
Mom put the bag of groceries down on the glass-top table. “What’s really going on here?”
Just then Pedi woke up, her eyes drowsy and focusing. I felt a heavy pressing on my chest.
When she saw Mom, she crawled across the couch and clamped her arms around her waist. “Mama…you know what? Manny…”
“Wait a minute, mija.” Mom said, hoisting her up by the armpits and sitting her back on the couch. Not altogether awake, Pedi flopped back asleep. Mom looked about the room like small flames were beginning to sprout on the floor. “What the hell is going on here, Magda? Why are you dressed up like that? Did anybody come?”
“Nobody came, Momma,” Magda said, dryly.
“Then why are you dressed up like that?”
“I’m just trying on new clothes for tomorrow, that’s all. We’re supposed to go to work dressed up sometimes.”
“You never dressed up for work before.”
“Yeah, I have. I’ve gone to work dressed up!”
“No, never.” Mom sounded sure, but also a touch disappointed that she’d caught Magda in a lie. She never scolded her, since she was too grown up and the only one in the family working steady.
“I’ve dressed up before,” Magda said, glancing at me. She expected a nod of agreement, but I didn’t give her one. She pursed her lips and twirled back with an innocent smile. “How’s Grandma’s house? Is Dad still going to sell it?”
About to open her mouth to answer, Mom instead curled her finger slowly, as if trying to pluck something delicate out of the air. “Don’t make the same mistake I did, Magdalena,” she said. “Don’t ruin your life, mija.”
“I’m not ruining my life, Mom! You keep saying I’m going to ruin my life.”
Mom shook her head like she wasn’t listening. She’d gathered up her own thoughts, and would use them to do the figuring. “Your father and I ran off together when I was sixteen. You were already big in my belly.” For a moment she looked to put her hand on Magda’s shoulder, but held back, rubbing her arms. “Don’t make the same mistake I did, that’s all I have to say.”
At first Magda said nothing. If she’d kept quiet everything might have blown over. But then an angry heat began seeping into her face. She could understand Mom being angry at her. She could accept any punishment, but she couldn’t accept the fact that she’d already been judged—especially in the voice Mom used, a voice like an accusing needle—and there was nothing left for her to do but be guilty.
Magda, breathing heavily, pinched her eyelids tight. “You don’t tell me what to do,” she said, in an even voice, but squeezing her fists. Then she widened her month. “You shouldn’t ever tell me what to do!”
“I’m not telling you what to do!” Mom said, surprised by her sudden anger.
“Yes, you are…you are,” Magda said, unclamping one finger from her starchy knuckles. “If you ever tell me about my business again I’m going to leave. You hear me!? Me and Linda, we’ll get our own place. What will you do then, huh, Mom, with no money? What will you do then?”
Mom looked like she’d been poked in the chest with an icepick. She stammered. There was a squeak in her voice. “Mija, I only…”
Her voice sparked a watery trickle in my throat, but there was nothing I could do. When Mom and Magda warred against each other, it was their war, and anyone who got in between them became an enemy. Magda’s face was fierce, and loaded with hurt. She braced her legs and wiped a splash of spit from the side of her twisted mouth. Whatever scolding or advice Mom had once been able to give her, she wasn’t going to take anymore.
That’s when Mom’s eyes began to weaken, and she bent down slowly to pick up the groceries from the glass-top table. She walked into the kitchen and set the bag rustling on the linoleum counter. It tipped over, and a can of pork and beans rolled out, stopping on the metal flange of the counter and bobbing back. Mom watched it, then turned to open the closet door next to the pantry. She grabbed a broom, shrugged, and began sweeping, the straw bristles scraping the floor. First one corner then another, she herded the dirt to the center of the room.
I pulled out a bedsheet from the hamper, and for the rest of the afternoon lay down in the hallway underneath the water cooler, relieved that Mom hadn’t found out about me almost shooting Pedi. I crunched lightning out of ice cubes and watched the sun slowly whittle away the shadows from the walls. The sun, pressing down on everything, was too crippling to let anyone do anything other than drag oneself around. In that heat even the birds squirmed, and if you stood in the sun, it was like your shadow was groaning to escape.
My mother kept coming in and telling me to get out of her way. Once to bring in chairs from the kitchen, while she mopped the floor, another time to string a clothesline from one end of the hallway to the other. Water swished in the kitchen sink as she squeezed clothes against the scrub-board, churning, then wracking and splatting them as she ruffled the wetness out.
“Mom, how’re those gonna dry under the cooler?” I asked, raising up on my elbow.
“Oh, they’ll dry. Don’t you worry about that. In this heat even ice will dry. Besides, you don’t have to worry, the cooler’s going off.”
“Off!”
“Yes, off!” she said, shoving me with her foot. “Do you think electricity is free?”
She didn’t turn off the cooler, though. Her hand paused over the switch, and she sort of half turned her head toward me. Then she bustled back into the kitchen.
&
nbsp; I don’t know how long I lay there not thinking anything, watching the clothes flutter under the cooler breeze. I saw one of Magda’s dresses hanging above me on the clothesline, a flower print with fluffy shoulders and gardenia patterns stitched on the bottom hem. I saw Nardo’s white shirt that he used when he was a busboy, with ghosts of smudges on it. Whenever he sprouted beyond his sleeve size, Mom trimmed his clothes and passed them down to me.
Then I began thinking about a lot of things. I thought about this girl in school, Maria, how she sat behind me in class and I could feel her breath on my neck, smelling of caramel candy. The way her hair was soft around her ears made my stomach landslide with a strange, delirious emotion. For a long time, I remember, I couldn’t touch anything without feeling a little current of mystery traveling inside it.
All my thoughts were coming forward, one by one, then flying away. I thought about the time in spring, after the rains came and everything sighed, how I climbed the largest maple in the Big Lawn and looked around. I could see people walking under me, hear their voices, as I lazily veered on the branches, the wind twittering the leaves. I thought about Nardo, who was hardly ever home anymore. Always on the move, drinking with his wino friends, snatching up his coat while feeding a long line of excuses to Mom’s disbelieving ears. I thought about how Mom kept cleaning the house, shifting dirt from one place to another. Maybe she thought she could get the house so spanking shiny that someday it’d disappear in one great sparkle, and she’d be free. I thought about Dad, how on his breezier days, he’d unhook the buttons on his sleeve and fix something around the house. When was he going to quit butting his head against a wall? When was he either going to break it, or break his head? I thought about happy times, too. I thought about Grandma; how when she got new eyeglasses, she discovered Mexican movies. She liked to see the singer Flor Silvestre cradled in her costumes of spun radiance, and watch westerns from Mexico, with brick-red sunsets and a ribbon of blue mountains in the distance.
For a long time I lay there, thinking, my head pillowed on my arm. Thoughts came like damp, echoing coughs, and the air felt empty. I sort of began to feel like no gravity was holding me, and I was spiraling down a long, black tunnel. Looking up, I remembered the bullet, which I figured got buried inside the cooler shaft. I prayed no one would ever see it. The thought of how close I’d come to killing Pedi gave my lungs a peculiar sponginess, as if apart from my body they’d been sobbing for hours.
7
The Boxing Match
When summer ended, I was again at the same school. Mom’s plans to get me transferred didn’t work out. The administration said it was too late. There were already too many kids in that school. There was an imbalance in the student body—whatever that meant. They said lots of things, but it all ended with me not transferring.
So I was sitting with my friend Albert Sosa, eating lunch on the picnic table over by the maple trees, when all of a sudden Lencho Dominguez came and parked his big beefy shadow above us. We liked eating lunch there, because every day around twelve o’clock one of the English teachers, Miss Van der Meer, would step out of her classroom and swoon our minds with the gorgeous way she’d fluff her hair and fix the collar of her ruffly blouse. Her legs dangled from the hem of her skirt like two shapely white bowling pins, and her shoulders were straight as a geography book.
We acted like that wasn’t why we ate lunch there, but it was. Anybody could see how cold it got. The wind already had glass edges to it, stiffening muscles and practically cutting through the stitches of our clothes. When it blew, the chill stabbed our teeth like icicles, and our voices jiggled every time we talked. Yet our eyes melted when Miss Van der Meer appeared at the door.
Anyway, Lencho came over and eyed us like we were hopeless. He was dressed in Big Ben pants, starched stiff as ironing-boards, and a plaid Pendleton shirt with the lap and tail out. Hardly a smile of a wrinkle showed anywhere. He cleared his throat with an exaggerated gutter.
“You vatos are real screwy, you know that?” he said, in his strep-throaty voice.
Rumor had it that Lencho stripped his voice by smoking cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes and drinking Jack Daniel’s whisky straight from a thermos bottle stashed in his locker. He leaned over and fingered about a dozen of Albert’s fried potatoes. “That white bitch teaches a class of gavachos, and you guys hang around waiting to see her ass.”
“Whataya mean?” Albert said, acting sore about Lencho thieving his potatoes. He knew better than to complain, though. No one complained to Lencho. I once saw him grab Mark Calavasos by the tits and squeeze until he grit his teeth and begged Lencho to please, please let him go.
“You guys ever been in that room?” Lencho mumbled, snatching and pushing another load of Albert’s potatoes into his mouth.
“No,” I said, pretending to not be interested. Actually, I must have wondered a thousand times about what was behind that door.
Daintily flicking salt from his fingers, Lencho did a curious thing. He wet his two fingers on his tongue, and pinching the crease of his pants, ran them down to his knee. He did the same with the other pant leg. We watched him with open-mouthed fascination.
“Well, let me tell you vatos,” he said, finishing his grooming with a swipe of his pocket. “There’s couches and sofas in there. You guys ever seen couches and sofas in a classroom?” He laughed, a sort of half chuckle, half sneering laugh. We looked dumbly at him, and he laughed again, only louder. “You vatos are screwy—you know that? You’re a couple of real sissies.”
He didn’t say it like an insult, but more a statement of fact. If he’d have asked us, we’d have agreed with him in a second. Compared to Lencho, everybody was a sissy. He had lumpy sacks of potatoes for shoulders, and even the weight of his breathing made you feel puny.
He put his knuckle to his mouth and cleared a big wad of phlegm and spat it out. “I want to talk to you about something, Manny,” he said, seriously. “Do you think that maybe Bernardo might wanna join my boxing team?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He’s a pretty tough vato, ain’t he?”
“I guess so.”
“What do you mean you guess so? Don’t you know anything about your own brother?”
“He doesn’t tell me everything!” I said, trying to toughen my voice. I must have sounded whiny, though, because Albert ducked his eyes.
It was the truth about Nardo. He mostly told me what he had done and how he felt about what he had done, but never anything about what he was planning to do or anything about what he wanted to do. If he thought about something, he’d ask me in a question, like, ‘Hey, Manny, do you think I should join Lencho’s boxing team?’ He hadn’t asked me a thing like that lately, so I didn’t know.
“Well, anyway, ask your brother if he wants to join,” Lencho said. He stamped his Stacy Adams shoes on the bench and walked away, eyeing his snazzy polish.
That’s when Miss Van der Meer came out of her classroom. She had a load of books crooked under her arm and was mangling a cluster of keys against her hip. As usual, there were some white students pattering like puppies behind her. She fished a key out and locked the door. Lencho walked toward her, tiptoeing—with dignity—trying not to get any grass on his shoes. He hopped on the concrete walkway.
“Hey, Lench!” I yelled. “Albert says he wants to join. He says he could whip anybody in the whole school—even Boise. He says he’ll even take on Boise.” I got up and gave Albert’s shoulders a champion’s massage.
Annoyed, but not wanting to make a big commotion around a teacher, Lencho turned and shot a hidden Screw You finger at me from his hip; then, coolly deadening his face, he zipped past Miss Van der Meer, almost bumping her shoulder.
As he passed, the white students cold-stared Lencho like he’d just peed on the Queen of England. They weren’t about to say anything, though. They knew his reputation. Besides, Miss Van der Meer pretended like she hadn’t noticed a thing. That’s the kind of teacher she was, too preciou
s to notice anything.
That’s when I yelled out, “Hi, Miss Van der Meer!” It was one of those phony-baloney hi’s that always comes out sounding smoochy. She turned around and automatically started to wave back, but then recognized that she didn’t know who I was. She tossed a polite hand at me anyway, and her students hurried her away.
“You jerk! What the hell you do that for?” Albert moaned after Miss Van der Meer and her pack of puppies rounded the corner. He was steamed. He snatched angrily at his hair. He stood up, grabbed his books like he was about to huff off, then changed his mind and plunked them back down on the table. “Man,” he said, in a mopey voice, “now she’s gonna think we’re a coupla idiots.”
“We are a coupla idiots, you idiot,” I said, defiantly, but I could see regret tightening on Albert’s face. He was convinced that we’d never get another chance to moon over Miss Van der Meer on the sly. But to me, Lencho was right. It was stupid sitting out there stuffed in a mountain of double sweaters, waiting for some teacher to make a grand appearance. She paid us less mind than she would a wad of chewing gum stuck on the sidewalk. That much I could tell by the way she waved at me.
I wanted to tell Albert this, but he was looking like he just got plugged on the shoulder with an arrow. “Man, Lencho’s gonna have it in for you!” he said finally, perking up in almost a gleeful way, like he wouldn’t be too sorry if Lencho knocked in my teeth.
“He won’t do anything,” I said.
“Oh, no!?” Albert stressed, anxious to prove me wrong.
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t want to mess with Nardo.”
“Oh, yeah.”
He was glum again. He didn’t have a brother, only a sister, and she’d as soon slap him in the face as smile. When you’re like Albert, and you don’t have protection, any day of the week, on any street corner, a guy like Lencho can kick in your rib cage and nobody would give a damn.
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