When the lunch rush is done and there’s time to chow down on some taquitos, he likes to hang with me. He’s captivated by my vocabulary. How do you know so many big words? They’re not so big, I tell him, they just sound that way. He wants me to teach him. He says he’ll show me how to pick up girls if I teach him a few words so he can sound more like he’s from here. I ask him if he’s ever been apprehended by the immigration agents. Muchas veces, he admits. Too many times. They just drive me to the bridge and drop me off, but next day, I’m back. He chuckles, then shows me all these little shreds of napkins in his wallet with names and phone numbers. Kristin. Vicky. Melanie. Gina Lee. Rachel. What’s the deal with the white girls, I ask him. I like how they are so free, he says. These gabachas don’t care. They got . . . how do you say confianza? Confidence, I tell him. He nods and smiles as he sounds the word out. One of these babys, he says, is going to be my confidence. I’m going to marry her and become semi-gabacho like you. Which honestly makes no sense to me, since I want to be like him.
Cisco?
Yes, Dad says. He tells me the INS raided the place. Just as they were opening, three men in uniform and one in a suit walked in the employee door and started yelling. Conchita, who works in the kitchen, hid under the metal prep table between two large pots, which is something ’cause she’s over sixty and not as spry as the others. They found her first. Then they looked in the walk-in freezer and there behind the shelves, they found Cisco. When he made a joke about the length some people go to get free tacos, they slammed him to the floor and cuffed him. He bled from his nose all over his beautiful shirt. The agents made everyone, even my dad, show their proof of citizenship and work visas. They cited Mr. Alarcon for hiring illegal aliens and said they were going to visit the other shops in the franchise. It was an ugly scene, Dad said, played out right in front of the customers, who stood there at the counter watching the whole thing, and how Letty and the others felt ashamed and scared for Cisco and Conchita, but went ahead taking orders for tacos with the tears settling in the creases of their smiles.
Some weeks later at work, I ask Mr. Alarcon if he’s heard any news ’cause nobody seems to be talking about it. He says Conchita was deported to Juárez and won’t be coming back. As for Cisco, they decided to make an example of him for all his previous violations. He’s in La Tuna, serving a long sentence in that hellhole of a prison, he says. That boy’s not going to make it in there. Is there anything we can do? Can we help him? The manager shakes his head and says we can’t get involved anymore. We’re in enough trouble as it is. But he adds that Cisco told him that he had at home a whole wad of napkins with the phone numbers of friends who would bail him out in no time. He was confident of that.
Somehow, I don’t think that happened.
DEMON
EVERY CORNER OF THE WORLD has its changeling, and Demon broods in ours. With his solemn Mayan face sloping back to a scalp nicked with the hieroglyphs of old corrections, his eyes crossed and bloodshot, he is the oldest of our tribe, the smallest, and the least capable of grasping the long straws of his simple life.
When my parents move us to a house just a half mile from the Rio Grande, it doesn’t take long for us to meet the other kids in the area. Striking friendships we think will last forever, we play street football, ride our banana-seat bikes up and down the dried irrigation ditches, play hide-and-go-seek till nightfall and liven up our summers with sno-cones and monkeyshines. Somehow, Demon is a part of all that. He just shows up one night and sits down with us while we tell ghost stories. He doesn’t say a word, just sits on our porch and nods like a monk every now and then. I see his dirty scabbed elbows and his hands, small and calloused as a rancher’s, and wonder what he’s been through. When my mom calls us in, he abruptly jumps to his feet and shuffles off.
Who’s he, I ask Kino, one of our newfound camaradas.
That’s Demon.
Demon?
A toda madre. He’s cool.
What’s his real name?
Kino thinks for a second. I dunno.
Where does he live?
Somewhere over there, I think.
For a few days, nobody sees him around. We don’t really miss him, but we wonder about him anyway. Then he’ll turn up like he was always there. I’ll spot him from the back seat of the car trudging along Alameda Street in a pair of stiff jeans too big for him. There goes Demon, I say to Mom and Dad. Pobrecito, my mom says back.
We all kinda know something’s not right with Demon but nobody mentions it. We treat him like one of the team, except when we wanna play Dare. We dare him to do the riskiest shit ’cause we know he’ll always comply. He’ll jump into Mr. Martinez’s yard to steal some peaches from his tree for us. He’ll throw water balloons at the Border Patrol vans for us. He’ll run to the girls from down the street to ask them if they’ll hike their dresses up for us. He’ll get into some ugly fights too. He takes on kids bigger than him and even when he’s losing, he doesn’t quit. He’s fearless. But he also does the things that we’d never dare anybody. Like suck enamel spray off a sock for hours at a time. I catch him once crouched in a culvert, rattling that ball bearing in a can of semi-gloss white. When I ask what he’s doing, he shrugs and does that thing with his mouth that he thinks is a smile and shoots some spray into a tube sock. Then he turns away and inhales it with an audible hiss. I see him teeter on his haunches for a long minute, his head bobbing on his shoulders like it’s about to come off, and I guess that’s one of the reasons people call him Demon.
He doesn’t seem to go to school ’cause we don’t see him in any of our classes. And by the time we get to high school, we don’t see much of each other, either. We outgrow our Demon days. Meanwhile, he becomes a solitary urchin roaming the hood with a rag and pail, asking people if they want their car washed. Later on, he’ll give up the pail and just ask people for change.
But I’m not thinking about that. I’m three-quarters through my freshman year at Riverside High and I’ve been seeing this girl. She lives far out in the Ysleta school district and I have to hop a bus to see her. We talk a little on her porch with the light out and then spend the next hour or so kissing and feeling each other up. We get to the point where we can’t go any further without doing something stupid and then we say goodnight. I walk back to the bus stop and ride the long dissatisfaction home.
The bus stops near Midnight and Alameda and I get off and start walking down my street. There’s no moon in sight and the trees throw dense shadows in my path. I hear the chink-chink of a keychain, someone walking behind me, and I think maybe some vatos in their gang are looking to jump me. I quicken my pace. Then I hear my name called in a dull syrupy voice I haven’t heard in years. I slow down to let Demon catch up. I can’t see his face, but I know it’s him. He’s wearing his jacket zipped up and the same stiff pair of old jeans bunched up at the ankles.
Hey, Demon.
¿Cómo te va, güey?
I’m nervous around him for no reason but I tell him I’m fine and ask him where he’s been.
Por aquí, por allá.
Yeah, I’ve been around too. I just came from my girlfriend’s house.
¿O sí?
He asks that in such an oblique way, like he wants to know more, like maybe he doesn’t know what a girlfriend is. Maybe he just wants to make conversation. I tell him I almost did it with this girl. I tell him she’s crazy beautiful and we’re all hot and heavy for each other, but I don’t know if it’ll work out because she lives so far.
¿Muy lejos?
All the way to Ysleta, I tell him. He stops and looks in the direction that I’m pointing, then he says, That ain’t far, güey.
It is far, Demon.
Almost every week I walk that. To see my tía.
Your aunt lives out there?
No. She’s dead. She’s buried in Socorro.
I’m sorry, ese.
He explains to me that he’s not. He explains that his mother didn’t want him and it was his aunt that rai
sed him from a baby, but she didn’t take care of him like she was supposed to. He had some checks coming every month from the government and tía kept all the money. Now she’s gone too and all he has is her grave to visit.
Pues, why do you go?
He shrugs and holds his hand to his chest like his heart’s about to leap out. I think of all the things we made him do, all the dares he undertook to be one of us, and how none of it made a difference anyway. ’Cause look where we are now. He comes back around to the subject of my girlfriend and remarks that it’s not the distance I’m afraid of. It’s her.
What do you mean?
You’re scared you might do it with her, güey. And then you’ll have a baby and who’s going to take care of that shit, right? ¿Verdad?
I’m about to tell him he’s wrong, that there’s a lot of guys out there who married really young and started families and they still get to follow their dreams, even if their dreams are small-time and probably hamstrung by family concerns, but he stops and mutters hey in that thick sleepy voice and unzips his jacket a little as he gestures me toward him.
With some apprehension, I look in the crook of his jacket and I think I see something moving, but it’s too dark to see what. I’m afraid it might be some ugly thing he’s saved up just for me. But then he opens his jacket wider and shows me a small bird, a sparrow nestled in his chest. It seems so still and unreal but when I reach my hand in, it flutters weakly against his shirt. Where’d you get it?
I found it. Its wing is broke. A cat almost got it.
What are you gonna do with it?
He tells me he’s going to take care of it till it heals and then he’s going to let it go at his aunt’s gravesite. I tell him it’s a real decent thing to do and that I hope it heals quick.
He nods more times than he should and then starts veering off to wherever his house is. Wherever forgotten changelings go. But there’s still something I have to know.
Demon, what’s your real name?
He stops in the middle of the dark street and turns around. He waits a while like he can’t believe I asked that question. I hear the bird against his chest.
You already know it, he says.
I can’t see his face, just the outline of that large tapered head, but I think he’s doing that thing with his mouth that he thinks is a smile. Chink-chink goes his keychain.
MEXICAN APOLOGY
MEXICANS DON’T KNOW HOW TO say sorry. For one thing, we don’t have the words in Spanish for it. Lo siento is what comes out. But that means I feel it. I know what you’re feeling. I empathize. A true apology, though, that’s hard to phrase in the Mexican mouth.
Which is strange. Because sorry is what we’re all about.
In our backyard having a glass of iced tea without the ice, I’m looking over the fence at the skinny brown kids riding their bikes to the bazaar being held in the church parking lot. Like I used to do before my bike got stolen. The makeshift booths are already glowing with strands of tiny blinking lights. There’s a DJ spinning discs for the gente who are throwing their dimes into cups for a chance at the Pink Panther plush toy. From where I stand, I see the sun’s last oblique rays setting on the lotería booth, where already someone in a flat nasal voice is calling out ¡La Sirena! ¡La Sirena! over the P.A. For sure, mermaids in the middle of the desert might be common as priests, like the one strolling among the throngs, nodding this way and that, smiling at everyone and placing the cup of his hand on the backs of the little ones’ heads.
All this is foreign to me now. All this is something I no longer want any part of. Some ugliness poisoned it for me years ago and none of it holds any charm in my heart this time.
My father comes out in his slippers, his bottle of Tecate foaming at the mouth. He holds it like a club and looks around for something to not talk about. He was born with an angry face, so even when he’s pensive, he looks like he’s about to slap someone across the cheek with a brick. He stands in his shorts and cotton shirt looking at the crowds milling through the bazaar, then takes a slug of his beer. The bottleneck is all knuckles when he drinks. Finally, he nods to me. I nod back. Taking this as a sign that we could be exchanging more than nods pretty soon, I turn my back and look over the other fence at the scrappy tufts of grass in our front yard. The words not now are riding the carousel in my head. Not now, not now, not now.
I can feel him shuffling closer, this man who shares his name with me, as the voice over the P.A. calls out another card. ¡La Escalera! The ladder. Our Mexican bingo doesn’t mind mixing the mundane with the archetypal. It’s all the same to us, if we really think about it. All part of this hard life where the days pass like kidney stones and the nights are remembered for the sobbing and the cursing and the fists through the walls. He stops behind me where I can’t see what he’s looking at, but I know his eyes land on everything but me. I’m this blind spot he’s never figured out how to talk to, though I think he’s going to try now.
A couple more shuffles and he’s right beside me, resting his arms on the chest-high fence next to mine. We’re both looking straight ahead at the slow parade of cars passing us on their way to the bazaar. The greasy smell of gorditas frying on the skillet lends a little grace to the moment, but only a little. We’re both tense as fuck standing in the waning light of a sun sick and tired of our bullshit.
I make out his profile against the wall of our casita. He’s breathing into his huge hands like they’re a pair of bellows. I used to believe I was another man’s son, I used to think he took me as his when he married my mother, I used to think that for no other reason than I wanted to. After all, what the hell do we have in common except a roof and a name? I see his drawn brooding features now and no question about it, he’s my jefito and I’m his son. I was born with the same angry face. The voice in the P.A. announces the next card. ¡El Borracho!
I’m thinking of all the things I need to tell him ’cause finally I’m big enough to take him on. I figure it will make my shit more justifiable if I turn into him for just this teenager moment. Let him see that angry face on me. What will you think of that, dear ol’ Pop? But then I wonder, what if this angry face is all he’s ever seen? What if it’s me who turned him this way? I wasn’t all that great a kid to raise, was I? I had my ugly moments too. I’m trapped in a thousand recriminations while behind us under the twinkling lights, families are placing their raw pinto beans on their lotería boards.
Amid the din of the bazaar, with all the children laughing and the mothers calling and the fathers throwing gritos in the air, I hear him say two words. Not the words I expect. But the words of a Mexican beaten down and tethered to the sins of fatherhood.
Era cabrón.
The words rise from his knuckles. Words that translate into I was a shit. I was not myself. I was something I won’t be from now on. I crapped all over your life, even when I meant well, and I know it. I won’t be that again. I’m your father. And today your father is a changed man. All in two words. They are as close to saying I’m sorry as anything in the lexicon of our culture. But it’s the way his eyes skirt mine that tell me the staves of his heart are bursting with remorse, black and mean. I don’t know if I look at him, but I think I do. I think
I nod again and say, It’s okay, Dad. Something in me wishes I didn’t mean it, but I do. ’Cause my own staves are cracking too.
He looks around again for something to moor him, but nothing avails itself, so he leaves the beer on the fence and shuffles back inside. I stand there watching the cooling air scatter the cottonwood seeds across this tired old town. My eyes go to the bottle and I see that he’s only taken the one swig. Without even thinking about it, I take it by the neck and down one too, right from the same mouth.
¡El Corazón! cries the P.A.
THE RUNNER
BLUR IS WHAT HE IS. A blur of desperate motion. Fleshed with some kind of unknowable need. I’m in my eighteenth year, feeling the press of graduation in my chest, but this minute I am calm. Eating my breakfast
. I feel his blur. The slap of a shoe padding across our porch gets me to the door. My first impulse is to see what’s missing from our yard. When I’m satisfied nothing is taken, I turn to him already forty . . . fifty . . . a hundred feet away tearing at a full sprint. He’s young, younger than me, hair so short the hieroglyphs in his scalp glisten. Wearing clothes his mother might have bought him at the K-Mart. A light plaid cotton shirt unbuttoned, flaring behind him like wings; jeans with the hems soiled and frayed, the tongue end of his long belt slapping against him with each stride; shoes foul with tramping through mud and standing water. He’s dark and his hair is dark and he’s getting smaller now, disappearing behind parked cars, reappearing as an even smaller runner on their other side. His shadow blurred to nothing. Mira como va corriendo, my mom says. It must be a mojadito. But he’s nothing like the crossers we’re accustomed to seeing. For one thing, they never run. They walk as if they belong. Like the air is full of trip-wires. Besides, there’s no one chasing this guy. No Border Patrol van. No gangs. And ahead of him, nothing he’s trying to catch up to. It’s just him running like the demons are on him. His sins swarming over him. Some infernal blood driving him out of or into a purgatory he dreads or yearns for. I think he wants to sprint himself out of this turgid life, race out of his skin and his name and his past and his destiny till his breath is all that defines him, those deep pants for air counseling him, urging him on; but before I dismiss the thought, before I realize how stupid I am to project on him my terrors, the dark bedeviled blur runs swiftly into the vanishing point and becomes it.
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