Last Summer of the Death Warriors (18 page)

“Don’t be silly. Let Juan take you in the wheelchair. We just built a new ramp up to the back door.”

Pancho expected D.Q. to question why they built a new ramp when he was only going to be there two weeks, but D.Q. didn’t say anything. He waited for Juan to bring the wheelchair. “Hello, Juan,” D.Q. said as he sat down.

“Hello, Señor Daniel,” Juan answered with a slight bow of his white head.

“This is Pancho.” D.Q. pointed at Pancho.

Juan gave Pancho a smile and Pancho nodded back. There were deep creases at the edges of Juan’s eyes, probably from having to smile all the time, Pancho thought.

Pancho turned around to get his backpack. “Leave your things in the car,” Helen said. “Juan will take them to your rooms later.” Pancho grabbed the pack anyway. He wasn’t going to let the revolver out of his grasp.

“Rooms?” D.Q. asked. “What rooms?” He stopped the wheelchair by grabbing the edge of the wheels.

“Your room, the one you always stay in,” Helen answered.

“And Pancho?”

“I thought he’d be more comfortable with Juan.”

“Oh, Helen!” D.Q. was shaking his head in disbelief. “What a piece of work you are.”

“Daniel—” She stopped herself. “Please don’t talk to me that way.”

They all stood in the space between the garage and the side of the house. D.Q.’s knuckles were red from gripping the wheels of his chair. Juan was smiling like an idiot. In the distance, Pancho could see a brown horse trotting around the boundaries of a corral, looking for the gate.

“Pancho is staying with me.” The veins in D.Q.’s neck were sky blue and bulging.

Helen’s face was red. “In your room?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve made plans for a night nurse to come in. I don’t think…”

D.Q. grabbed the sides of his head. It looked as if he were trying to keep his skull from exploding. “Helen. I don’t need a…night nurse. I…need…Pancho. That’s…why…he’s here.”

Pancho looked at D.Q., surprised. He remembered what Marisol’s brother had said about D.Q. having his own servant.

The wheelchair moved forward, catching Juan off guard.

“There’s only one bed in there,” Helen said behind them. D.Q. wasn’t paying any attention to her. She turned to Pancho. “I just thought you’d be more comfortable in Juan’s apartment. The apartment has two bedrooms. You’d eat with us, of course. But you could also cook in your own kitchen if you wish. Or eat Juan’s cooking, which is out of this world. You guys can watch the Spanish channels. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with Juan?”

“Could be,” Pancho said, still thinking about D.Q.’s words.

They went up the ramp at the back of the house. D.Q. motioned for Juan to stop at the top. The far boundary of the property
seemed to be the same place where a rocky formation began its slow transformation into hills and then mountains. Close to the house, there was a swimming pool in the shape of an S. A red barn stood next to the corral and now Pancho saw two more horses. They looked older and more subdued than the horse that pranced round and round the corral. “That’s Caramelo,” Juan said, pointing at the restless horse.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Helen asked D.Q. She was beginning to calm down. “This will be so good for you. Look over there.” She pointed at a grove of piñon pines halfway down the property. “Stu had a contractor build you a screened-in porch in the shade of the trees. We ran electricity out to it and installed a hammock, because I know how much you like hammocks. There’s even a bathroom. You can sit out there and breathe in all that fresh air.”

“While I go to the bathroom?”

“I didn’t mean that.” She tried to smile.

“It’s cold out here, isn’t it?” D.Q. crossed his arms.

Helen and Pancho looked at each other. They were in the shade of the house, but it was a warm eighty-degree day. Helen opened the screen door, and Juan pushed D.Q. inside.

They moved through the kitchen with its dozens of copper pots and pans hanging from a structure in the middle of the ceiling. They passed a room with a small table for four, and then another room with a table long enough to seat sixteen. Then they were in a long hallway with rooms on both sides. At the end of the hallway, there was a wheelchair on a steel platform. The platform was connected to a steel tower that rose to the top of the stairs.

“It’s an elevator, basically, with a special battery-operated wheelchair that can be detached. We had this installed so you wouldn’t have to climb the stairs,” Helen announced. “Isn’t it nifty?”

“Nifty,” D.Q. said, unimpressed. He transferred himself to the motorized wheelchair. Helen buckled a seat belt around his waist and pushed a green button. D.Q. began a slow ascent.

Pancho tried to carry the wheelchair upstairs, but Juan didn’t let him. “No worry. I get it,” Juan said. He had a heavy Mexican accent. He was an old man, Pancho noticed, much older than his father. His dark brown arms were thin and sinewy, like the roots of pecan trees. Juan folded the wheelchair and placed it underneath the stairs, out of view.

“He won’t need that anymore,” Helen said.

Helen, Pancho, and Juan climbed the stairs. They reached the top at the same time as D.Q. Helen walked up to the wheelchair and detached it from the platform. Then she moved a black lever on the right armrest. The chair rolled forward and hummed. “What do you think?”

She had thought of everything. Pancho was sure that D.Q. was thinking what he was thinking: There was no way he was getting out of there in two weeks. But D.Q.’s face was expressionless. “Try it,” Helen urged. “Juan, help him.” Juan seemed to jump every time Helen called his name. Whether he jumped with fear or eagerness to please, or both, Pancho didn’t know.

“I can do it.” D.Q. put out his hand to stop Juan. “I’m not an invalid yet.” D.Q. pushed the black lever, and the chair zipped forward, the wheels leaving a trail in the lush green rug. D.Q.
went down the hall, tried to turn left, and crashed into a corner. “Oops,” he said. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.” He set the wheelchair in reverse, straightened out, and turned the corner. Helen touched the scratch on the flowered wallpaper as she walked by.

D.Q.’s room was blue: blue curtains, blue bedspread, blue walls. Only the carpet was white. The bed was bigger than any bed Pancho had ever seen. On the wall in front of the bed hung a flatscreen television. D.Q. went immediately to the window and opened the curtains. Pancho knew that D.Q. liked daylight. At Casa Esperanza, D.Q. never closed the curtains during the day, or at night for that matter. D.Q. turned the wheelchair around and surveyed the room. Pancho looked out for the mountains, but all he could see were other large houses and the interstate highway in the distance.

“We can put Pancho’s bed over there.” D.Q. pointed at a desk with a computer. “We can move the desk under the TV.”

“You’re going to be so crowded here.”

D.Q. ignored her. “Juan, is there a bed for Pancho that you can move in here?”

Juan was standing by himself out in the hall. He looked at Helen and waited for her to nod before he spoke. “I can bring cot that folds. It has good mattress. Thick mattress. I get it?”

“Go ahead,” Helen said, giving up. “There are some sheets in the closet of the guest room next door.”

Pancho put the backpack on D.Q.’s bed. “I’ll help with the bed.”

“Is okay,” Juan said. “It has wheels.”

“Well, I guess I’ll let you boys get settled. Juan will bring your bags. Is there anything you’d like to do?”

“Sleep,” D.Q. answered.

“Yes. Rest for a little while. We’ll have lunch around noon. Then maybe…well, we can talk later, after you rest.” She looked at Pancho, inquiring with her eyes what he was going to do.

“I’ll go take a look at that horse.” It was the first thing that came to his mind.

“Help me get in bed,” D.Q. said to him. “I’ll see you in a while, Helen.”

“Should I ask Juan to wait to put the bed in until after your nap?”

“No, he can bring it right in.”

She seemed at a loss as to what to do or say next. “I’m so very happy you’re here,” she said.

“I know,” D.Q. said softly. “I’m glad you’re happy, Helen.” It sounded to Pancho as if he meant it.

“Until later, then.”

Pancho exhaled loudly as soon as she left the room. D.Q. said, “She sure is trying, isn’t she?”

“Trying what?” Pancho went over to the bed and pulled back the bedspread.

“I can’t believe I left the perico at Casa Esperanza. You’ll call…someone about it.”

“Yes, I’ll call Marisol and make sure it doesn’t get lost. She can bring it over when she comes to see you.”

“Juan can go get it. Tell him I said so.”

“All right.” Pancho knelt down and untied D.Q.’s sneakers. He helped him stand up. “Those pants are full of puke.”

“That was embarrassing. Puking in the middle of the freeway. Poor Helen.” D.Q. unbuckled his belt. He let his pants drop down and then stepped out of them.

“What’s that on your legs?” Pancho was looking at blotches of red skin on D.Q.’s thighs.

“Dry skin. The whole machine is breaking down. Would you mind rubbing some cream on my legs?”

“I’m not rubbing nothing on you.”

“It’s hard for me to do it and they’re very itchy.”

“Hell no.” Pancho picked up the pants with his thumb and index finger and threw them across the room. He helped D.Q. pull his shirt over his head. “Why are your legs so shaky?”

“I’m slipping down the Karnofsky scale fast.”

“The what?”

“It’s a scale the medical profession uses to gauge where a terminally ill person is on his journey toward the inevitable. At a hundred the illness is there, but it has no symptoms. At zero, well, you can imagine where I’ll be at zero.”

“Zero is zero.”

“Correct.” D.Q. stretched himself out on the bed. Pancho covered him up.

“Whereabouts you think you are now?”

“On the scale? I think I was about eighty until yesterday. Then last night I sank to around sixty for some reason.”

Marisol,
Pancho thought. D.Q. had said she was coming to visit, but something else must have happened that D.Q. wasn’t telling him. “What’s thirty like?”

“Around thirty you start wearing diapers.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly. And guess who will have to wipe my ass?”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not wiping you.” Pancho took his backpack from the bed. He looked around for a safe place to put it. He opened one of two sliding doors. The closet was full of hanging shirts and pants. He put the backpack on the floor inside, then he pulled the chair from the desk and sat on it.

“You want to hear a real tragedy?”

“I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“I will. I’ll tell you this and then I’ll sleep.”

“I should probably help that guy Juan with the bed. He looks like he’s hitting twenty on that scale.”

“Juan? Juan just looks frail. I was visiting here last year before I got ill and I tried to help him out in the barn. I couldn’t keep up with him. He’s been with Helen since Helen married rich.”

“She married the lawyer.”

“Yeah. Good old Stu. Stuart is his name but he likes to be called Stu. He does quite well, as you can see.” D.Q. closed his eyes for a few seconds, opened them, and then closed them again. “You know that pretty nurse, Rebecca? The one that made your heart go wacko every time you saw her?”

“I know who she is.”

“She rubbed my legs with cream once.”

“Get outta here!”

“I’m serious. It was at the beginning of this week. Monday or Tuesday, I’m not sure. You went out someplace. I had just finished with the chemo treatment and she noticed that the skin on my arms was dry. I told her it was worse on my legs. They were all red and blotchy. She asked me if anyone had taken a look at them and I said no. So she made me put on one of those nighties, and
when she came back she said she was going to rub some cream on my legs. I was a little embarrassed. I mean, what if, you know, what if I had a natural reaction to her touch.”

“You mean, what if you got a hard-on?”

“I was afraid of that.”

“You’re making this up.”

D.Q. continued speaking, his eyes still closed. “She rubbed cream on my legs. All over my legs, from my ankles all the way up, all around. She came this close to touching my private parts.” D.Q. lifted his hand from under the sheet and held his thumb half an inch away from his index finger. “The tube of cream, whatever it was she was using, fell on the other side of the bed, and when she reached over to get it, one of her beautiful, soft breasts touched my arm.”

“Man, you’re dreaming.”

“It’s the truth, Pancho. It’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not foolish enough to think that she was attracted to me. She was being kind. She was giving me the pleasure of her touch. Not because she felt sorry for me or anything. Just out of kindness.”

Pancho waited for more to come, but D.Q. had stopped talking. Just as Pancho started to get up, D.Q. spoke again. “But nothing happened. Isn’t that the cruelest thing you ever heard?”

“What did you expect? You think you were going to get laid right there in the hospital room? People walk in and out all the time.”

“No, I’m not talking about that. I mean, nothing happened to me. There was no natural reaction in me. Nothing. I felt her soft hand all over my thighs. I felt her breast. Nothing. The radiation. The chemo. The cancer. They zapped all the sap out of me.
Maybe you were right. Back at St. Anthony’s when you said that life sucks. Maybe you were right.”

Pancho wanted to say something funny, to tease D.Q. somehow, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited a few minutes until he thought D.Q. was asleep. Just as he started to leave, D.Q. spoke again. “Don’t forget the perico,” he said.

O
ut in the hall he met Juan pushing a roll-up bed. “He’s asleep,” he told him. “Leave it, I’ll set it up later.” There was a look of doubt on Juan’s face, as if he were considering the consequences of not following Helen’s precise instructions. “It’s okay,” Pancho assured him.

“Is okay,” Juan said. They turned around and walked side by side. When they were going down the stairs, Juan asked tentatively,
“Hablas español?”

“No,” Pancho answered.

“No?” Juan was surprised. “How can it be?”

Pancho shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t feel like explaining to Juan that his father only spoke to him and Rosa in English. He wanted his kids to be Americans. Rosa knew more Spanish than Pancho did because she learned it by watching telenovelas.

At the bottom of the stairs, Pancho stopped for a moment, not knowing which way to turn. Juan motioned toward the way they had first come in. Pancho remembered that he needed to call
Marisol to inquire about the famous perico. “Is there a telephone I can use?”

“Sure. There many phones. Even outside there’s phones. Let’s go outside, you be more private there. I show you around.”

“Okay.”
Outside is good,
he thought. He felt like he had dropped ten points down that death scale that D.Q. talked about ever since he stepped inside the house.

They went outside and Pancho breathed deeply. They were on a terrace overlooking the grounds. Caramelo was still circling the corral. Pancho walked to the farthest end of the terrace and looked down at the pool. Sunlight shimmered on the light blue water. Juan came and stood next to him. “Is a lot of work taking care of all this. I take care of pool, horses, garden.
La Misses,
she likes lots of green, but this is desert. We have well just for grass and plants. Another well for house. But underneath two wells, water comes from same place, no? How does water down there get full again? It never rains. No snow. Is not normal to try to grow plants and grass here in desert. Cactus,
nopales,
that’s okay.” Pancho kept staring at the surface of the pool. “The water in the pool we buy. Big truck comes every year. Come, let’s go down.”

They stepped away from the edge of the terrace and walked toward a stone stairway next to the newly built wooden ramp.
“El joven
Daniel is very ill, no?”

“Yeah.”

“La Misses
is very happy to have him here. All last month she put in the ramp, the elevator. I painted a room in my apartment. She said you stay there. Good, I like company. But Daniel wants you to stay with him. You must be good friend to him.”

Pancho sighed. Two weeks. That’s what he had promised D.Q. He wondered if he could make it in this place for two weeks. It wasn’t so bad outside, though. He would need to find something for his body to do. At Casa Esperanza, the endless rickshaw rides kept him tired and therefore calm. But here? He remembered the huge pile of rocks he had seen on the side of the driveway as they drove in. “What are those rocks out by the driveway for?”

“Ahh. Those rocks.” Juan shut his eyes and rubbed the top of his head with his hand. “Those rocks are gonna kill me.
La Misses
wants to build a stone wall around the pool. But no truck can go back there. So they dump the rocks in front and I haul rock back there. One, two rock at a time. My back. I’m old, you know. Seventy-two.”

“I’ll help you move the rocks.”

“Nooo. You a guest here. You relax, keep Daniel company. You two sit by the pool or in the
kiosko
we built out by the pinones. Is cool out there.”

“I need to work.”

Juan disappeared into the space underneath the stone stairs and came out with a tattered straw hat in his hand. “For sun.” He put the hat on. They walked toward the corral, following a stone path through a garden of desert flowers.

“Where’s the husband?”

“The who?”

“You know,
La Misses’s
husband.”

“Ah.
El Señor
Stu. He works all the time. Travels. He in New York now. I’m in my apartment watching TV or asleep when he comes in. I hear his car. Even on Saturdays and Sundays he
works.” Juan made a face. People working on Sundays was something he would never be able to understand. “He’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But
La Misses,
she wears the pants in the house.”

“Yeah.” Pancho stopped. A bee was buzzing around his head. He stood still and watched it land on his arm. His father once told him that bees can smell when you’re angry or afraid of them and then they sting you in self-defense. If he concentrated on the spot where the bee was, Pancho could feel the touch of its tiny legs walking calmly on his arm. He realized that he did not feel any anger. He had always imagined that he would confront Robert Lewis out of anger or with anger. Where had the anger gone? It had disappeared, but the decision to make Robert Lewis accountable for his sister’s death had not. That decision was still there. Pancho could feel it, solid, inevitable.

Juan put his finger on Pancho’s arm in the path of the bee. The bee climbed up onto Juan’s finger. Juan brought the finger close to his mouth and blew on it. The bee flew away. “You not afraid of bees,” Juan said, as if discovering something about Pancho.

“You neither,” Pancho responded. His father used to blow bees away from his finger just like Juan.

“They still sting me. When I cut flowers, they mad. They think all flowers are theirs.” This time when he laughed, Pancho noticed that he had a tooth missing.

At the end of the stone path and the garden with the wildflowers was another path that led to the corral. The corral was farther away from the house than it first appeared. They climbed onto the first rung of the fence. Juan clucked his tongue at Caramelo.
The horse snorted and shook his head. “He’s
testaduro,
that horse,” Juan complained. “How you say
testaduro?”

“Stubborn.”

“So you understand Spanish, but you don’t speak it.” Juan took a cube of sugar out of his pocket. The horse sniffed the air, moved toward them, and then jumped away.

“He’s wild.”

“He’s young. They wild when they young. Like you.” He smiled as if he knew something. “You can help me train him.”

“How do you do that?”

“Tomorrow I show you.”

“I’m not much of a rider.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be a long time before we ride him. Tomorrow and for many days, we throw a rope around his neck and we let him run like that with the rope until he gets used to you. Then you begin guide with the rope. You get closer. Like that, little by little.”

“How long does it all take?”

“A few weeks. There’s no hurry. A little each day.”

“We’re only gonna be here two weeks.”

“Two weeks?
Dos?”
Juan seemed confused.

“La Misses
didn’t tell you?” There was some sarcasm in Pancho’s voice.

“No. She say you here to stay.”

Pancho jumped down from the wooden fence of the corral. “I better go make a phone call.”

“We go to my place. I show you.” Juan stepped down slowly, holding on to Pancho’s shoulder. They walked back. “Why you
want leave here for? This is nice easy place to live. You and Daniel live here.”

Pancho looked at the house. It looked like a palace in the distance. A Spanish palace in the desert. Why would D.Q. not want to live here?
It’s not a good place to die,
he remembered D.Q. saying. Despite the pool and the grass and the plants that Helen had forced out of the ground, the place was still a desert, dry, desolate. Not that Las Cruces was much different. And yet there was something about this house that seemed dark and
closophobic,
like Josie used to say. The horse back there knew it. He was going crazy running around and around, trying to find a way out.

“You like it here?” he asked Juan.

The question caught him by surprise. “Eh? Me like it? Is a good place for an old man. I have daughter in L.A. Five grandchildren. I go see her for Christmas. I spend my whole life in city working in rich people gardens. In L.A. for twenty years. My wife, Sara, and I come to Albuquerque fifteen years ago, then she die. Three years ago, I come work here. Is okay. Someday soon I take all I save and go back to L.A. I build little room in back of my daughter’s house. She and grandchildren take care of me when I’m old.” He grinned. “More old.”

The entrance to the apartment was up a green wooden staircase in back of the garage. Juan held the door open for Pancho.
“Micasa,”
Juan said. Inside was one big room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. The stove, sink, and refrigerator stood at one end. There was a round table with three chairs by the windows that faced onto the driveway and the air conditioner that Pancho saw when he arrived. A sofa and a recliner sat by the windows that faced the corral. “I show you phone.” Pancho followed
Juan into a narrow hallway where there were three doors. “The bathroom,” Juan said, knocking on the first door. He knocked on the second door. “My room.” When he got to the last door, he opened it and said, “This was going to be your room.”

He moved out of the way so Pancho could step in. It was a small room with a single bed, a bureau with a television sitting on it, a desk with a chair and a telephone, a bureau with a mirror on top, and a bedside table with a lamp. For once Helen was right, Pancho thought. He would be more comfortable here.

“I leave you.” Juan closed the door.

He stretched himself out on the bed and closed his eyes. He wondered what he used to think about before Rosa died. He didn’t think he thought about anything when he was alone. This thinking about things that he had never thought about before started recently—first with imagining and planning how he was going to kill Robert Lewis, but it soon went beyond that. D.Q. and all his happenings, Marisol and the new feelings that she brought, even the Death Warrior stuff occupied his mind. Thoughts came to him out of nowhere. He needed to get in the ring with a better fighter, someone who could knock him out and stop the thinking.

He imagined now that D.Q. somehow accepted the fact that he would be better off staying with his mother. He would get over whatever happened with Marisol and Helen would hire her as D.Q.’s nurse. She would come over every day and Pancho would get to see her. He would not tell her how he felt about her, but she would know somehow. They owed it to D.Q. not to be open about their feelings. Helen would give him a job as Juan’s helper, and eventually he’d move out here and this would be his room. Then
what? He hesitated about going any further.
D.Q. dies or doesn’t die?
Which direction should his imaginings go? D.Q. dies. Pancho stays on as Juan’s helper. Juan eventually goes to live with his daughter in L.A. Pancho finishes high school. There must be a high school somewhere around here. He’d have to buy a car. What did Juan use for a car? He starts going out with Marisol. What would he do to make a living? This was an area of his life that he never thought about. He would work in construction as a carpenter. Would Marisol be okay with that? Maybe he would take over Juan’s job. Helen would always need a caretaker. And Marisol, they could move into the apartment. She’d drive to town to work. But if you were Marisol, would you want to live over a garage? And when the kids came, there wouldn’t be any room for them.

Or D.Q. doesn’t die. Johnny Corazon gives him an herb that makes him better. What happens then with Marisol? He’d have to go away. He’d move someplace else so D.Q. would have a chance with Marisol. He couldn’t do that to D.Q. Why? Since when did he start caring?

He opened his eyes and focused on the light fixture on the ceiling. He could see dead moths in the bottom. His Rosa. He must not forget about her. Robert Lewis. The only thing about the future he needed to concern himself with, the only imagining he needed to have, was the road that led to Robert Lewis.

The telephone was on the desk. He got up, sat at the desk chair, and took out a piece of paper from his wallet. He dialed. He heard the ring on the other side.

“Hello?”

“Marisol?”

“Pancho, is that you? What a nice surprise. Where are you?”

“We’re at D.Q.’s. At his mother’s.”

“How is it? Is it nice?”

“It’s fancy.”

“How’s D.Q. doing?”

“He’s worse. He doesn’t look good. He got worse overnight.”

“Oh.” He could hear her breath, shallow and rapid. “It happens sometimes. All of a sudden, there can be a shift. It may be temporary. He could bounce back.”

“He’s worried about his wooden parrot. He says he left it in his bed, mixed up with the sheets.”

“I was heading out there now. I’ll look for it.”

“Yeah. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It’s like he can’t live without it.”

“If you made it, I can understand why he wants it.”

He felt a lump in his throat. There was no reason in the world why he should be getting a lump in his throat at this particular time. What was the matter with him anyway? He was going soft all of a sudden.

“Pancho, are you there? What’s the matter?”

He put the receiver away from his mouth and cleared his throat. “Ahh, you think you could bring it when you come visit? D.Q. said you told him yesterday when we were walking to the park you’d come visit.”

“I won’t be able to come till next Saturday. Can he wait that long?”

“Probably not. If you can hold on to it, I’ll see if this guy who works here can go get it. His name is Juan.”

There was a pause on Marisol’s end of the line. “Did D.Q. tell you what we talked about during our walk to the park last night?”

“He said you would come visit us, ah, him, here and maybe even go to Las Cruces. You have an aunt and a cousin who live in El Paso.”

“Is that all he said?” She sounded relieved.

“What else would he say?”

She spoke slowly. “We talked about things, like we always do. We talked about the difference between friendship and love. I told him that what he and I had was friendship.” She stopped.

“Oh.”

She waited for him to say more. Then she asked, “How’s he doing?”

He knew that this time she was asking about D.Q.’s emotional well-being. “He seems hurt. Angry. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s even angry at me.”