Drowning Tucson (2 page)

The night before, he had lain awake listening to the sound of the swamp cooler switching on periodically, its engine vibrating the ceiling, and it took him a long time to find a rhythm to the motor’s whirring, a regularity to the intervals when the sound would cease and he could doze off. When he finally slept, his dreams were short, violent snatches of being chased by cops, beating groups of rival gang members, the sounds of weeping mothers and girlfriends mourning the loss of their men. It seemed the whole city wept, like it was drowning in tears over the blood shed on its streets every day. Felipe woke with the sound of wailing in his ears and lay awake the rest of the night trying to erase the terrible images from his mind.

After he hugged his mother goodbye, he walked toward Country Club Road, wondering why he was more ashamed and scared than proud. Although it was his fifteenth birthday, he didn’t feel any wiser. He had been looking forward to this day forever. He was supposed to gain some sort of knowledge about life, but he only felt confused. And lonely. His friends waiting for him at Torchy’s could never understand the pressure he was under. Even Ricardo could not know how Felipe was torn between his destiny as a Nuñez and his desire to leave this neighborhood to seek an entirely different life.

His friends were only waiting so they could make fun of him one last time. He knew they were actually terrified of him. They were probably jealous too, though Felipe thought he had a better reason to be jealous than they. At least they had a choice in their futures. If the Kings didn’t pick one of them, they could fade into anonymity. But he had been chosen. He had never specifically been told there were no other options. He simply became aware of the fact as he grew older. It was his arranged marriage.

His brothers had sculpted him into a petty criminal before he was old enough to realize what they were doing. When he was six, they’d babysat him every Friday while their parents worked late. Instead of
playing with Felipe in the backyard or reading him books, they walked him over to Food Giant, plopped him into a shopping cart, and toured around the grocery store, filling his pants and shirt with cigarettes and candy and beef jerky. They bought a gallon of milk, then wheeled him out of the store, laughing about how they’d pulled another one over on the gringos. It was always pulling one over on the gringos. It would be another two years before Felipe understood what gringos were. He thought they were some kind of monster when he was a boy. He couldn’t understand why every night when he asked his mother to tuck him in and pray the gringos don’t get me mommy, she’d laugh and sign the cross above him. If it was so funny and they were so harmless, then why were his brothers and their friends always talking about getting them? Every Friday they’d go back to Food Giant and fill Felipe’s clothes and get the gringos, and Felipe grew so used to their game that for years he had to check himself when he went grocery shopping with his mother. His hands would grow itchy. His pockets felt twice their size, taunting him to stuff them full when no one was looking.

It didn’t take long for his brothers to tire of that game. There were other ways to get gringos. Other ways to groom their youngest brother for greatness. The Food Giant jobs were fun, but they were too easy. After all, if a six-year-old boy could get away with stealing cigarettes week after week, then the gringos had bigger problems than the Nuñezes.

The day after Felipe’s eleventh birthday, he pulled his first real job. It was the one that finally earned him respect and credibility with the Kings. He was sitting at the park watching his brothers play ball with their friends, smoking cigarette butts he found lying along the edges of the basketball court. When it began to get dark, they sat on a picnic table passing a joint between them, watching the occasional drunk stumble past with a brown bag clutched in his fist. They made bets on which ones would fall over and which ones would actually sit down before passing out. The bet with the highest odds was guessing which drunk would actually puke. Most of them pissed themselves, a few even smelled like they had just shit their pants, but puking was something these guys just didn’t seem capable of doing. They didn’t waste liquor.

A drunk gringo stumbled toward them in a dirty, grease-stained trenchcoat. Felipe’s two oldest brothers, Chuy and Rogelio, bet their friends the guy would pass out standing. Five bucks. Five bucks? How bout I get Marcela to suck you off instead? Okay. Everyone watched as the drunk drew closer, stopped, teetered, found his footing, then bee-lined for a metal trashbarrel and hugged it as he vomited into the container. They all thought the same thing. FUCK. I knew I should’ve bet this one was a puker. The boys laughed and Chuy told them if I get that bad, just kill me. Just give me a kick in the head. His best friend, Peanut, said why don’t we get a little practice on him? The drunk was slumped against the trashbarrel, breathing heavily and cradling his paper bag. Felipe laughed, trying to sound tough. Kick his ass. They all laughed at him. Talkin like a big man. Like a real vato. Peanut said why don’t we let Felipe do it? He needs to take things up a notch. Show his Nuñez blood. If Peanut hadn’t said that last line, Felipe’s brothers might have laughed it off. But once he mentioned their name, they were obligated to make their little brother go through with it.

Felipe looked at his brothers. They were silent for too long. Usually they’d snap right back with a smartass comment or something, but they weren’t talking. They were trying to decide between the danger of sending their baby brother to beat a grown man—what if the guy’s not that drunk and he hurts Felipe?—and the necessity of upholding the family name. Felipe knew it was decided before his brother Rogelio elbowed him in the ribs and told him go roll that fuckin bum. Just go up and blast him upside the head and check his pockets. Before he could think of an excuse, Felipe was being cheered on by the guys, and Peanut was pointing to the crown tattooed on the back of his neck, nodding to Felipe and looking genuinely proud of him as he stood up and walked quickly over to the drunk before he could chicken out. When he was still more than twenty feet away, he could smell the liquor pouring off the guy and knew he was probably blacked out already, or at least too wasted to fight back, so he ran straight at the man, the cheers of the guys behind him propelling him faster, and he kicked him dead in the side of his skull and the man’s eyes shot open, confused, full of pain and surprise, and for a moment Felipe thought fuck, I’m dead, he was faking all
along, not realizing he was still kicking the guy in the side of the head until he heard the man grunt and saw him fall over onto his side, spilling his beer on the ground around him, and Felipe’s foot hurt like hell, but he ignored it and punched the guy in the stomach, then shuffled through the stinking-drunk gringo’s pockets, only finding a dollar and some change and a crumpled pack of Merits, happy the man had been too far gone to fight back or even see him coming and pleased with himself because he knew he had made his brothers proud, their whoops and yells of approval making him feel twice his size.

All the way home, his brothers congratulated him on how he’d rolled the fuckin gringo like a Nuñez. Just like a real goddam vato. They took turns rustling his hair and slapping him on the back. You’re one of us now. At the time Felipe wasn’t sure what that meant. One of who? A Nuñez? A King? But as the years passed and he grew closer to his brothers and their friends, he realized he was both.

The day in the park had been a test for Felipe. Peanut had wanted to see if the little guy had the same craziness in him as his brothers. He also wanted to know whether or not Felipe would take orders. Kicking some drunk’s ass was only a start. A baby step. Felipe knew this too. So he wasn’t surprised when their neighbor, Señor Gutierrez, went on vacation and the Kings decided to poke around in his house a bit. Since it was summer, Felipe was left alone all day with his brothers. The Kings gathered at the Nuñez house and snuck down the alley toward Señor Gutierrez’s backyard.

Behind the back wall someone said okay Felipe, you’re the first one in. Climb through that back window—break it if you have to—then go around and unlock the back door. We’ll take care of the rest. They lifted him over the wall, giving him words of encouragement, and he ran to the house, stopping only to pick up a stone and throw it through the old man’s bedroom window, then feeling around for the latch. He unlocked the window and climbed inside. The house was cool. It felt quiet and holy, like a church, and he immediately regretted breaking in. He suddenly realized this wasn’t a gringo’s house they were messing with. It belonged to Gutierrez, the poor man everyone in the neighborhood liked. He wanted to run out the front door, circle around, and tell the
guys some bullshit about how there was an alarm or he’d heard a dog growling. Besides, there isn’t shit here to steal anyways.

He looked out the window and saw them waving and gesturing impatiently. A couple had already jumped the wall and were walking toward the house. Felipe turned around and passed through the room—trying to ignore the old man’s neatly made bed and the photos of his dead wife and son on the nightstand—and into the kitchen where he unlocked the back door and let them in and considered yelling why are we messin with old Gutierrez? But he’d already been pushed out of the way by the guys surging through the back door. In all, they spent less than ten minutes ransacking the house, and when they met back at the Nuñez’s house their take was a VCR—the TV was a console and too heavy to get out in a hurry—eight cassettes, a gold-plated Seiko watch, and a jar full of quarters. Not much of a haul, someone said. But for Felipe it was too much.

Stealing from a store or slashing tires or pouring sugar into a gas tank was easy. It was easier still to kick some drunk’s ass and take his money. But Gutierrez was a friend of the family. They were stealing from a person they knew actually needed the things they were taking. He wasn’t a drunk. He wasn’t a bitter burned-out shell, like most of the old people in the neighborhood. He was kind and cheerful and all the kids on the block knew this. They knew he gave out the best candy every Halloween. They knew if their school was having a fundraiser, Gutierrez was guaranteed to buy something from them. Even back when Rogelio played soccer for the AYSO, Gutierrez had donated money to the team for uniforms.

Felipe didn’t like the guilt he was feeling. He had no desire to hear the Kings applaud him for his performance and his balls. But it was a step in the right direction. Felipe was moving up, and he knew it.

And so did all of his peers. The ones waiting outside Torchy’s, smoking cigarettes, checking out the bitches, whistling at the young mommys on their morning walks. Felipe didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to hear their questions about his big day. He wanted to walk right past Torchy’s and Food Giant and the El Campo tire store where men lazed about on stacks of tires, waiting for customers, their hair held up in black hairnets and cigarettes flapping in their mouths. He could go south to
Interstate 10 and maybe over to Benson and then to Las Cruces or El Paso, wandering the desert in search of a different life. But he was too scared. He had no idea what was out there. Here at least he knew what was expected.

He was jealous of his friends. They could commit a crime and everyone would consider them men. Or, if all else failed, any of them could find a willing girl and take her behind Torchy’s and throw her on the mattress by the dumpster, climb on top of her, and lay her good while she squirmed beneath him, feigning interest but really reading the posters stapled to the building advertising Mexican beer or pork rinds, silently translating the Spanish to English and back to Spanish until the boy above her was finished. If he forgot, she’d remind him to give her a hickey so he could prove he’d slept with her. She’d scratch his back a little or grab his arm enough to leave a bruise for him to show off to his friends. But being a Nuñez meant there were no other options. Just bite the bullet, take your lumps, and carry on. It was that simple.

Ricardo saw him round the corner first. Hey, Felipe. The rest of the guys stood and yelled here comes Mister-the-King himself. Takin names and smackin bitches. Felipe smiled, but he wanted to tell them all to fuck off. Get your little asses off the wall and go to school. It made him sick the way they sucked up to him. Especially because he knew they all talked shit behind his back and were probably bursting with anticipation for the after-school initiation. All except Ricardo. He was the only one who knew Felipe’s secret—that he didn’t want to be in a gang. That he didn’t want to spend his life pretending to hate cops when really he was afraid of them. If Felipe joined the Kings, he would be one forever. Until he died, or went to prison, or got married and found a job fixing cars or working in a restaurant.

His friends gathered around him. Hey, Felipe, you bring your helmet for after school? They laughed. Lit more cigarettes. We thought maybe you had some last words. Yeah, you know, maybe you should pray for your soul during lunch. They joked the rest of the way to school and Ricardo occasionally patted Felipe on the shoulder, when no one was looking.