by Matt Mendez
“Amen! Amen! Amen!”
• • •
“Do you think I can have a Bible? If you have an extra or something?” Juan asked Eddie’s father as the minivan stopped in front of Danny’s house, engine running. By the sermon’s end everyone had been gently swaying copies over their heads, singing along to some pumped-in gospel music. “I want to read about the flood.” After hearing Grampá’s mass murder story and Pastor Cool’s series of unfortunate events, Juan wanted to read the verses for himself.
“That’s one of my favorites,” Eddie’s father said, turning around in the driver’s seat. “You don’t have a Bible at home?” He seemed more puzzled than judgmental. Like Juan told him his house didn’t have windows.
Juan squeezed his way from the van and hopped onto the sidewalk. “I don’t think so.” Eddie’s mom and sisters were staring at him, Eddie was looking away, and Juan realized they were ashamed for him. “Never mind. Bye, thanks.” Juan booked it for Danny’s front door.
Eddie’s father shut off the minivan and followed him. “Hold up, Juan.”
Juan paused. “This is my friend’s place,” he told him. “It’s cool for me to be here.” The sun was in Juan’s face, forcing him to squint. He looked down the street and could see the development where he’d been arrested.
“I know this house,” Eddie’s father said. “It’s Daniel Villanueva’s. He’s in our congregation.”
“You mean the Sarge?” Juan had no idea Danny was a junior. “I didn’t want you guys to have to drive me all the way home. You’ve been cool enough.” The truth was, Juan was horrified they might catch Grampá passed out in the Imperial or Má walking out in her work clothes. He also didn’t want to go back in that van, to make Eddie go back in that trunk.
“Where do you live, Juan?”
“In Central.”
“We live right in Five Points. That’s real close. Are your parents there now? I can still drive you.”
“My má is, but she works late so she’s probably sleeping. My father . . .” Juan paused again, then out of his mouth came “My father is on death row.” Juan felt weird enough saying “my father”; being fatherless was who he’d been for so long. But the death row part—the unexpected, unwanted part—was an unbelievable relief. He no longer had to wonder about the other half of himself—the parts he didn’t recognize—even if those parts could be part murderer. Part monster. He was whole for the first time.
Then, to Juan’s total surprise, Eddie’s father hugged him, a strong, no-escape, nothing-bad-could-possibly-happen-to-you kind of hug. He was taller than Juan, like Eddie, and muscular in the arms and shoulders, in great shape except for a soft belly. Juan sucked air through his mouth, his nose suddenly clogged with snot; he was sobbing. Sobbing! He couldn’t stop. The clean white shirt and tie Eddie’s father wore was turning into a wet mess, and Juan felt himself going limp, his head light. Eddie’s father held him up, telling him the Holy Spirit was with him and everything was going to be fine from now on.
DATABASE OF SHIT
(CHAPTER FOURTEEN)
The Sarge wasn’t home and neither was Danny’s mom. Juan was no longer sobbing but in a daze as Danny, wearing, oddly, a pair of work gloves, walked him upstairs. Juan needed to sleep, for the pounding in his head to stop. Danny dropped him on the top of his bed and grabbed a blanket from his closet. Juan wondered vaguely if Danny’s gun was in there, next to his blankets and clothes, the image of it, the crisp sound of the pop, suddenly floating in from his memory. Danny cracked open a bottle of Gatorade and left it on the nightstand, not saying a word. He was a good friend, and that was Juan’s last thought before drifting off to sleep. When he awoke, head still pounding, eyes and mouth dry, embarrassed from crying, there was JD, laptop open, staring at him, the look on his face screaming: Finally!
“Listen to this,” JD said, not even waiting a second for Juan to fully come to. “ ‘You clown police. You gonna stop with all that killing all these kids. You’re gonna stop killing innocent kids, murdering young kids. When I kill one or pop one, y’all want to kill me. God has a plan for everything. You hear? I love everyone that loves me. I ain’t got no love for anyone that don’t love me.’ That dude’s name was Jeffrey D. Williams. Now listen to this one. ‘Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end. Life is too short. I hope that anyone that has negative energy toward me will resolve that. Life is too short to harbor feelings of hatred and anger. That’s it.’ He was Richard Cobb. Listen, this next motherfucker, Jesse Hernandez, was crazy. ‘Tell my son I love him very much. God bless everybody. Continue to walk with God. Go Cowboys! Love y’all man. Don’t forget the T-ball. Ms. Mary, thank you for everything that you’ve done. You too, Brad, thank you. I can feel it, taste it, not bad.’ What the fuck? ‘Go Cowboys’? Who the fuck gives a shout-out to a football team right before getting put to death?”
Juan struggled to sit up. He grabbed the bottle of Gatorade and took a long drink, his dry mouth feeling instantly better. His splitting head was another story. “What the fuck are you reading? What are you even doing here?”
JD shrugged. “Danny texted that you were here. That Eddie’s cult family dumped you off. I had to borrow my sister’s hooptie to drive over. Mine is a little banged up, if you remember.”
Juan downed the rest of the sports drink. “Thanks for coming?” The walls of Danny’s room were covered with drawings—not mural style, but comic book art, panels freshly painted. Juan tried to follow the action as it spread across the room, but it wasn’t finished and there were few words. He looked at the carpet and noticed paint stains everywhere. The neat vacuumed lines and new smell was already gone.
“The Sarge is gonna be pissed,” Juan said, pointing at the stains. How could Danny have ruined this already?
“Oh yeah. He’s completely fucked when his jefe walks in here.” JD scanned the room like he’d just noticed the paintings. “But I like the work. ‘The Rip’ is a good title. I guess Danny is an artist. But back to business. Dude, I found your father! And what the fuck I was reading were the last words of dudes who’ve been executed by the state. It’s all online. The state tracks everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. What the dudes did. When they’re scheduled to die. Their last words. Their race. Where they’re from. What they ate. It’s a whole database of shit.”
“Really?” Juan sat the rest of the way up. He knew all sorts of information could be found online, but Texas keeping all that data in one spot seemed crazy.
“I know what you’re thinking: ‘That shit’s crazy.’ ” Of course JD got right in his head.
“I was thinking that, but how do you know you found my father? I didn’t tell you his name.”
JD had a cocky look on his face, the same one he had whenever he scored a bucket during garbage time. “You told me when he was scheduled to be executed. He’s the only one set for Valentine’s Day.”
JD turned the laptop toward Juan. The brightness was blinding, but as his eyes adjusted Juan saw the old form that had been filled out on a typewriter and eventually scanned for the Internet. That’s how long his father had been locked away. A last-century killer.
NAME: Armando Aranda
DOB: December 9 DR: 999178
RACE: Hispanic HEIGHT: 5'8"
WEIGHT: 130 EYES: Brown
HAIR: Black
COUNTY: El Paso STATE: Texas
PRIOR OCCUPATION: None
EDUCATION LEVEL: 11
PRIOR PRISON RECORD: None
SUMMARY: Convicted in the shooting death of 60-year-old Sheriff Clark Jones. Aranda and two accomplices attempted to rob a diner when the victim was shot, once, fatally through the head by Aranda.
CODEFENDANTS: Fernando Mendez and Carlo Rubio
RACE OF VICTIM: White male
The picture of Armando Aranda was in black and white, the photocopy no good, blurry and darkened and making it hard for Juan to recognize anything but the information underneath. H
ispanic. 5'8". Brown eyes and black hair. Highest level of school completed: eleventh grade. Juan struggled to breathe; those details could easily be his own. He wished JD would close the laptop, suddenly not wanting to know any more about Armando Aranda.
“I got all the info I could on him,” JD explained. “More than just what’s on this site. Gotta tell you, it’s not great.”
Juan rubbed his head; it was still throbbing. “Maybe I don’t need to know all the specifics.” Juan hadn’t been ready for this JD, for go-getter JD who had all the details that put his father on death row. The letter Armando had written to his má had been mostly sweet, thoughtful. It couldn’t have been written by a monster, right?
JD was staring at him, his face as confused as Eddie’s dad’s had been earlier that morning. “It’s too late for all that. If we are gonna make the trip, you need to know what you’re getting into. You can’t wait until you get there to find out the shitty details. We’re going to a prison, dude. Maximum security. Death row. It’s gonna be fucked up.”
Juan couldn’t concentrate. The pounding in his head and the comics Danny had drawn were distracting him. On the wall near the bed, the Rip—a teenage girl who looked a lot like Roxanne, except she had wild blue hair and was dressed like a Goth Selena—sat in one panel squeezing her head; the next showed a close-up of her face grimacing between the palms of her hands. In the final, incomplete panel, she was someplace totally different and dressed as a general, leading a platoon of half-painted soldaderas. The caption below read: The Rip—Master of the Multiverse! All four walls were the same. Each with the Rip partially drawn and painted, going from one unfinished to another barely there universe. Juan wondered what was happening on Danny’s walls, but more than that, he wondered what would happen to himself once he knew what Armando had done. If, after knowing, he would be like the Rip, going to another universe. One where he no longer recognized himself. After all, he’d only read the one letter, where Armando seemed more sad than dangerous.
“Man, where are you?” JD said.
“Sorry,” Juan said. “These drawings are fucking me up. I didn’t notice them when I came in.”
“Danny smokes too much weed.”
“Yeah,” Juan agreed, at the same time wishing he had some weed right now. “You mind if I read what my old man did for myself?”
JD handed him the laptop. “Sure, man.”
Juan read about the diner and the robbery, about the murder of Clark Jones. The knot in his gut he was getting while reading the short article was probably the same one that twisted in Má’s when he used to ask about his father. Did she wonder, like he was wondering now, if death row was his birthright? Juan now understood why Má always turned squirmy when talking about his father, why she insisted on waiting until he was “older” to tell him the truth, because the subject was “complicated.”
“I wonder how it happened,” Juan said, handing the computer back to JD. “Like, maybe it wasn’t all his fault. Sometimes shit happens. You know?”
“I don’t know how you accidentally shoot a dude in the face, but the articles don’t say, really,” JD said. “But you’re right about shit happening. I don’t know.” JD was being a good friend, just like Danny was earlier. Looking up the information. Coming to get him. Lying to him. “I looked up the rules for visiting. We have to be on his list, otherwise we can’t get in.”
Juan began to sweat. “So we can’t visit. We’re fucked.” He couldn’t tell if he was upset or relieved.
“We’re not fucked yet. I dropped a letter at the post office that should go out tomorrow.”
Juan sprang to his feet. The shit getting real. “You did what?”
“Cálmate. I just did a little lying. I said you’re a blogger—that’s the lying part—and I’m a filmmaker, and that we’re interested in telling his story and hope he would put us on his visitor’s list. Okay, a few more lies. But if my letter takes three days to get to him, another couple for the guards to read it and then give it to him, and then say one more day to put us on the list, we should be good. We can leave Friday or Saturday and be there by Sunday for visiting hours.”
Juan began pacing the room. He caught a glimpse of Danny through the window. He was in the backyard, shoveling peat gravel into a wheelbarrow from a huge pile in the corner. Was the Sarge making him landscape the yard by himself? Juan turned to JD. “What if he doesn’t want to be in a movie or a blog?”
“What if he doesn’t want a son? If you were about to die, finding out you had a kid would be kinda fucked up, no? You might not want to deal with it. I think it’s better if we don’t give him the chance to say no.” JD clenched his fists as he spoke, obviously excited. And probably right.
“You don’t think it’s still kinda fucked up? We’re not bloggers or whatever.” Going back to the window, Juan watched Danny wheelbarrowing and dumping mounds of gravel over the naked desert ground, smoothing the piles he’d made with a rake.
“Dude, I’m at least trying to make a movie, so that’s true. And any asshole can be a blogger. Open a Tumblr if you’re so worried about lying. We can do it for real; I don’t care. . . . One more thing.”
“What?” Juan returned his full attention to JD, though he suddenly wondered if Danny’s life wasn’t as great as he’d originally thought. They didn’t hang as much since he’d moved and the Sarge had retired from the army. He’d help him shovel gravel right after talking with JD—would make JD landscape too.
“We need a vehicle. Mine’s busted. Let’s ask Danny to come. His parents wouldn’t notice if he was gone all weekend.”
All of a sudden everything was happening too fast. But JD was waiting for an answer. “True. Let’s do that,” Juan told him.
But there was this: the plan was good. And it felt crazy, unreal. He’d gone so long barely saying a word about his father to anyone. And he’d never told anyone how blank he’d always felt, like a character in a story who’d been bonked on the head and was unable to remember who he’d been before; but instead of trying to help him recover his memory, everyone seemed to wish he’d just be cool with being an amnesiac. He thought he’d always be alone with his “daddy issue.” But everything was suddenly changing. And now, just after mentioning the letter once, asking one time for help, JD—sometimes annoying-as-fuck JD—was going to take him to meet his father. Juan felt tears rolling down his face for the second time in a day, happy to hear his best friend in the world calling him “the biggest pussy on the fucking planet.”
FABI AND GLADI
(CHAPTER FIFTEEN)
Fabi sat on the sofa and read through the letter. She had to argue with Jabba to let her into the building the day before; the demented woman at first refused to let her inside so she could ask the new tenant if they were stockpiling any of her mail. The renter, a twentysomething girl, had been keeping a stack of it in her kitchen, not sure what else to do with it. Frustrated, Fabi had snatched the loose heap of junk mail and bills and left without going through it. She hadn’t noticed the slim letter from the El Paso County Clerk’s office until now.
Juan’s arraignment was set—the letter a single page with all the particulars. Building location and case number, day and time. In a week Fabi and Juanito would be in front of a judge, and now she knew what “evading arrest” meant. It was a Class A misdemeanor, meaning it was the most serious and could land her Juanito up to a year in jail. Ay Dios. Ay Dios. On top of that, she still had no idea what she was going to do about the pregnancy. She needed a new job, and to make shit worse, Gladi was in town.
Gladi had arrived unannounced that morning from McAllen, Texas, with her bags, her gringo husband, and two small Yorkies that hadn’t stopped barking. They were in the kitchen with Papá, talking quietly about how they’d planned to spend a week at the house but didn’t know Fabi and Juanito had moved in. They didn’t mind getting a hotel. Didn’t want to be an “intrusion.” Gladi was a clinical psychologist with the VA. Fabi could never remember what her gringo husband did. Some
thing in an office, by the looks of him. Tall, doughy, and bearded. Geeky with glasses. They’d been married a couple of years; Fabi skipped the wedding.
“Hey, Fabi,” Gladi said, walking into the living room with Papá and her husband. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
“Why wouldn’t I be awake?” Fabi said. “It’s the morning. I’m an adult.” She held up the stack of mail she’d been going through for Gladi to see, minus the arraignment letter. She’d been hoping for another letter from Mando—though now she wondered what to write back. What could I possibly say?
Her sister looked like she wanted to come in for a hug, but Fabi stayed on the couch. She and her sister rarely spoke. It wasn’t like they’d had some big blowout, an overly dramatic reason not to. Their battle lines were simple. Gladi was the good girl, the one who never made mistakes, and Fabi was . . . well, not that.
“Let me take you to breakfast. How about Marie’s?”
“It’s an Asian-burger fusion joint now,” Fabi said. “And I’m not hungry.”
“What? And what? Besides you’re always hungry. What changed?”
“I’ve changed,” Fabi said, scooting away from her sister.
“No, she hasn’t,” Papá said, joining the conversation. “Your sister’s still rude like usual.”
“How about L&J? They have killer chilaquiles.”
Papá smiled at Gladi, always so giddy whenever she was around. “She’d love a free meal. She doesn’t have a job.” He looked at Fabi with his usual frown.
“That’s not nice, Papá,” Gladi said. “If she doesn’t want to go she doesn’t have to.”
“No,” Fabi said, standing up. The Yorkies were really yapping now; Gladi, Papá, and gringo husband were all looking at her. She could feel her anger building, rising from the bottoms of her feet and surging up through her body. “He’s right. Nothing I had planned for this morning matters. At least not now that you’re here. Not looking for a job. Not my abortion. Let’s go get those chilaquiles.”