Last Summer of the Death Warriors (8 page)

B
ehind the hospital, by the emergency generators, in a place that looked like no one had ever set foot there, he dug a hole through the crusted earth and buried the plastic bag with the revolver and the bullets. Then he grabbed his backpack and headed to the cafeteria. He had a couple of hours to himself while D.Q. was being examined. He wanted to read his sister’s diary, the parts he hadn’t already read.

He found an empty table in the corner of the cafeteria. He was digging in the backpack for the diary when he heard a voice.

“Hello there.”

The voice came from behind him. He leaned back and craned his neck until he saw D.Q.’s mother, her smiling face hovering above him like a sun. He tried to get up, but she placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down gently. She asked with a motion of her eyes and hand if she could sit down. He nodded and slid the backpack under his chair.

She had a tray with two white mugs of coffee. She took one of the mugs and placed it in front of him. “I saw you back here and
thought you could use a cup of coffee. You strike me as a coffee drinker.”

Pancho nodded his thanks, then raised the mug to his lips and slurped the coffee. She had come upon him unexpectedly and he needed time to observe, to figure out the kind of punches she was likely to throw.

“Do you take cream?”

“No,” he said.

“Have you been to Albuquerque before?”

“Once.”

She took a sip from her coffee, keeping her eyes on him as she did so. “Daniel wanted you to come to Albuquerque with him.”

“I had a choice. I think.” He didn’t say this to make her smile, but she did. Her eyes were a pale green, as if time and troubles had diminished their original brightness.

“My son must think very highly of you if he wanted you to be with him.”

“He doesn’t know me.” He didn’t need anyone’s admiration. Nor did he feel like fooling anyone into thinking he was something he was not. “I’ve been at St. Anthony’s all of one week.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “That wouldn’t prevent Daniel from wanting you to be with him. By now he knows all he needs to know about you, I’m sure.”

“Oh yeah?” He let a smirk form on his face. It occurred to him that maybe he would rob the lady blind once they moved into her house. That would show her how well her son knew him.

“When Daniel was nine, I used to catch him staring at a mirror, just standing there for ten, fifteen minutes without moving, without even blinking. I used to watch him from a distance. It
wasn’t some kind of precocious vanity on his part. It was as if he were trying to figure out the identity of the person in the mirror.”

Pancho remembered the boxers at the gym practicing their moves in front of the wall-length mirrors. He would watch where they kept their eyes. The good boxers looked at the motion of their hands and feet as if they were someone else’s hands and feet. The bad ones couldn’t keep their eyes away from their faces, trying on different menacing looks, eating themselves up. He understood what D.Q.’s mother was trying to say. A mirror, if used properly, was a tool.

She pressed on, animated now, like she had finally found someone who would let her brag about her son. “And he keeps a journal, you know. I still have some of the early ones. There’s no explanation for where he got the ideas and images for what he wrote. There was one entry that floored me when I read it. He wrote that the reason God created the world was because He was lonely. He wanted others to love Him, but He didn’t want to force them into it. So in order to make sure that there were souls that chose to love Him, He made the world such that He was kind of hidden. Then He put people on earth and gave them some clues about how to find Him. That way, some could choose to look for Him and some could ignore Him. And He could be sure that those who persisted in looking for Him truly loved Him.” She shook her head in disbelief and waited for Pancho to respond. “This was written by a nine-year-old,” she added, clearly hoping for some kind of reaction.

Pancho stared at her. He noticed tiny creases around her eyes. He remembered what Father Concha had said about her and he
wondered what kind of mental illness she had. There was something on the edge of crazy in the way she spoke. She and her son had that in common.

He pushed the coffee mug away from him with his index finger. It had been a day with way too many heavy conversations, the kind where you had to pay attention in order to understand. He wanted to go back to the hospital room, lie on the extra bed, and watch television. He glanced in her direction to see if she had finished talking. It didn’t look that way. She was staring at the wall in front of her, deep in thought. She was a striking woman, elegant, refined. The kind of woman who made you want to be polite. His father called that type of woman “a Country Club Lady.” “We gonna be doing an addition for a Country Club Lady today, so mind your pleases and thank-yous.” That’s what his father used to tell him. Then he remembered the Country Club Lady who refused to pay them because she did not like the location of a skylight, even though Pancho himself had seen her pick the spot where she wanted it. “I’m not giving you one dime,” she had said to his father when he handed her the invoice for the work. “You’re lucky I’m not getting my husband to sue you for a new roof plus emotional suffering.” The memory triggered a current of prickly energy in his arms. He clenched his fist and waited for the impulse to disappear.

She was speaking again. “What do you think makes a young boy have those kind of thoughts?”

“I don’t know,” he said, annoyed, still feeling anger from the memory.

She continued, appearing not to notice his tone of voice. “Daniel’s father died when Daniel was nine. One day soon after,
I was with Daniel in our little apartment and I felt like I was going crazy. I guess I had a few drinks. I put him in the car and we just took off. My head was exploding. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, I crashed the car against a tree. I think it was an accident. I’m not sure to this day whether it was an accident or whether some craziness inside me made me swerve. I broke a collarbone. Daniel struck his head on the dashboard. Later they told me that his heart actually stopped in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but the paramedics revived him. He was in a coma for a week.”

She swallowed, and her eyes reddened. Then she continued, “Daniel was never really the same after that. It’s like he saw things while he was in that coma. It was after the accident that he started writing in the journal, spending long periods of time staring at trees or at the stars. As if he was seeing things for the first time and everything was unbelievably beautiful. Maybe it was the accident that made Daniel so unique. Maybe that’s why he perceives the world so differently from other boys his age. Of course, being stuck with a mother like me probably had something to do with it also. Not long after that, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I had to check myself into an institution. Do you know much about bipolar disorder?”

“No.”
And I don’t want to know,
he said to himself. He pushed his chair back to signal that he wanted to leave. There was an intense look on her face that reminded Pancho of D.Q., only the mother’s intensity was different, more complicated. It was tinged with fear and hostility.

“A mother with bipolar disorder is not the best of mothers. The day I crashed, I was having a manic episode, I’m sure of it
now. It became clear to me that the best thing for Daniel was to be away from me. That’s when I remembered Father Concha, my classmate from high school.”

It occurred to him that D.Q.’s mother wasn’t just making conversation. She wanted something from him. Father Concha not too long before had asked him to be D.Q.’s friend, as if he could choose to be someone’s friend just like that. But D.Q.’s mother was not asking something for D.Q.; she wanted something for herself. He didn’t have to be polite to Country Club Ladies anymore. He decided to go ahead and ask.

“Is there something you want?”

She bent down to her purse on the floor next to the chair. It was a soft white leather purse with a shoulder strap and a clasp that reminded Pancho of the buttons on D.Q.’s cowboy shirt. She opened it, and for a moment, Pancho thought she was going to offer him money, perhaps to disappear out of D.Q.’s life. Maybe she saw him as an obstacle to her designs to keep D.Q. in Albuquerque. The idea made him chuckle.

She laughed, a knowing kind of laugh. “Sorry, I have to get a tissue.”

Mind your pleases and thank-yous,
his father had warned. But his father had been too kind. People took advantage of him. Even after the Country Club Lady with the skylight had threatened to sue him, his father had simply said, “I’ll leave the invoice here and trust you to do what is right. Thank you.” Then he calmly walked away. Pancho had stood next to his father then, feeling enough humiliation for the both of them, imagining what it would be like to bludgeon the Country Club Lady’s skull with his brand-new hammer. When they were in the truck, he said, “She’s
lying. She told us exactly where she wanted the skylight and that’s where we put it.” “I know,” his father responded. “If I make a stink, it will be worse.” “No, it won’t. If you make a stink, they won’t do it again.”

His father turned toward him. “It doesn’t work that way with people like her. If we make a stink, she’ll make sure I don’t get any more work. That’s all right. You run into people like that now and then. It’s part of the job. It’s not worth getting all aggravated about it. Besides, you reap what you sow. She sowed nastiness, she’ll reap nastiness. We sowed kindness, we’ll reap kindness.” Only it turned out that his father was wrong, dead wrong. Kindness had gotten both his father and his sister first taken advantage of and then killed.

He saw her wad the tissue in her hand and then speak. “I just want him to live. I don’t want him to give up. I want him to believe that he can beat the cancer. That’s what I want.”

“I meant what do you want from me?”

“I know Daniel well enough that if he wants you with him, it’s because he trusts you. You must be the kind of person that he feels comfortable being around. I can see why. I can see you are very much like him. You’re solid, just like Daniel.”

Fat chance,
he thought. He and D.Q. were different species, not even from the same planet. But he decided not to correct her. To do so would involve more words, and he was sick of words.

“We, my husband and I, live a very comfortable life. We have ample means, and all of them are at Daniel’s disposal. My husband is a lawyer, and he’s convinced I’m within my rights as a mother. If there were a better treatment being offered someplace else in the States or in the world, we’d fly Daniel there. No
expense would be too great. And it’s not just Western medicine. I know a sacred healer who healed me. I think he can help Daniel as well. We all need to be working as a team to fight this terrible thing. We must stop at nothing.”

He watched her become more agitated as she spoke. What she was talking about, she obviously firmly believed, and no one was going to convince her otherwise. What he couldn’t understand was whether she was asking for his help or warning him to stay out of her way.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “As you can see, it’s hard for me to be dispassionate about this. I know Daniel believes that I’m doing all this out of some kind of guilt for having left him at St. Anthony’s.” She looked at Pancho as if asking whether he thought that as well. He didn’t flinch. “Maybe there’s some of that. But you know what? Who cares? Who cares what my motives are? Leaving no stone unturned is still what is best for Daniel. All his talk about preparations and getting his own room to die in, I know about all that, and it is wrong. I don’t believe in it. It is no good. It is a slow form of suicide!”

He saw her face turn red and watched her pound the table with her fist. It wasn’t a hard pound, but it was enough for him to see that there was anger in her. The red blush of her face slowly disappeared as he waited for her to speak again. He made an effort not to smile. He enjoyed watching her get angry.

“Well, I’m sure you didn’t expect to hear all this today. You must be tired too.”

He made a gesture with his hands that said,
What difference does that make?

She smiled at him appreciatively, maybe for listening to her.
Then she looked at a small watch, glittering with diamonds, on her left wrist. “I have to go meet Dr. Melendez. He said he would have some initial information about Daniel and the treatment.” She placed the white purse in her lap and grabbed the shoulder strap with both hands. Her eyes rested gently on him. “I don’t know you other than the little that Father Concha told me. I know you’re all alone. You are welcome here too. You’ll be welcome at our home when you and Daniel come. You’ll be welcome for as long as you want. Everything we have is at your disposal as well. You asked me a little while ago what I wanted from you. I want you on my side. I want you to help me help Daniel. I want you and Daniel to stay with me here in Albuquerque for as long as it takes or go wherever we need to go to fight this disease with all we’ve got. You like honest talk. I can tell you do. Well, there it is.”

He nodded. He preferred “no talk,” but “honest talk” wasn’t bad.

“Does that nod mean you agree to help?”

“I’m just here for the ride,” he said.

“So you didn’t choose to come. You’re here. Why pass up the opportunity that has fallen in your lap? Think carefully about it.
Tú comprendes
what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” he said to her. “I understand what you’re saying.”

A
fter D.Q.’s mother left, he walked out of the cafeteria, took the elevator to the ground floor, and stepped out of the hospital. It was no longer the right time to read Rosa’s diary. Maybe tomorrow. He hung the backpack on his shoulder and began to walk. He took a right on Lomas Avenue and sped up, with no intention of going anywhere in particular. He was walking to rid his mind of all the words that D.Q.’s mother had flung at him, which made him feel like the inside of his head needed a good cleaning.

He walked for an hour and then stopped at a place called MaxDonald’s. It was a restaurant in a small, half-empty, dilapidated strip mall. The mall had a convenience store, a video store, and a place that sold insurance. The front window of the restaurant advertised in sloppy white letters the best jalapeño burgers in Albuquerque.

Pancho opened the door and paused. Rather than a restaurant, the place looked like a kitchen with a counter and a few tables. A fat man sitting on one of the stools at the counter turned
and looked at him as he came in. Two couples around one of the tables stopped talking. He went to the table closest to the counter and sat down. A woman came from around the counter with a glass of water. She pulled a menu from her apron and gave it to him. He didn’t open it. He told her he wanted a jalapeño burger and a Coke.

“You wanna get the plate or just the regular burger?”

“It doesn’t matter what you put it on,” he said. Someone near him laughed.

“Ha-ha, that’s very funny. The plate comes with Max Country Fries and a large soda. It’s a better deal than if you just get the burger and Coke.”

“All right,” he said. He looked around to see who had laughed. The fat man at the counter was eyeing him, a smirk on his face. Pancho waited until the man went back to his hamburger and then sized him up. The man was around twenty-five and had a haircut that had started out as a Mohawk. He had a thick football player’s neck and arms that had at one point lifted weights, but the rest of his body had gone soft with too much grease and beer. The man’s biceps bore a tattoo shaped like a crown of thorns. There were huge drops of sweat on his face. Pancho looked up and saw an air-conditioning unit high on the wall. It was rattling and a yellow ribbon tied to it was fluttering, but the air coming out of it was as warm as the air outside.

He took the three hundred dollars that Father Concha had given him and fanned the bills in front of him like a deck of cards. He held them like that until he was sure the fat man had seen the denominations on the bills. Then he took out his wallet and placed the bills inside. He folded his hands and waited. On
the wall opposite the air conditioner that didn’t work, there was a Coors beer clock shaped like a waterfall spouting out of some rocks. He wondered what time it would be before he got back to the hospital. He wondered if he even had to go back. Why not find a place to stay, track down Bobby tomorrow, and get the whole thing over with once and for all?
Why pass up the opportunity that has fallen in your lap?
D.Q.’s mother had asked. He smiled to himself. He tried to remember if an opportunity had ever fallen into his lap before, but nothing came to mind.

The waitress brought him an oval plate with a jalapeño burger and the Max Country Fries, which were nothing but regular fries in the shape of a pig’s tail. He took a bite out of the jalapeño burger. The fat man had finished eating and ordered another beer. He was taking slow swigs from the bottle and looking in Pancho’s direction as if he were waiting for him to finish eating. As soon as Pancho pushed his plate away, the man grabbed the beer bottle by the neck and waddled over to his table.

“Mind if I join you?” the man said. He pulled out a chair and sat down before Pancho could answer. The couples got up to leave. Pancho and the man were the only customers. The waitress was yelling into a cell phone. “You’re not from around here, are you?” The fat man looked down at Pancho’s backpack.

“Nope,” Pancho said.

“I didn’t think so. Not too many Mexicans come in here.”

Pancho looked around. There was country-western music on the jukebox and no Mexican-looking people in the place. “I saw the sign for the jalapeño burgers. I thought it might be okay.”

The man nodded. “You visiting here?”

“Yeah,” Pancho said, smiling. “I’m visiting.” He knew what was going to happen before the evening was over, and he was going to enjoy it as much as possible until then.

“Listen, you want a beer or something? I can get you a beer if you want.”

“Thanks, man. I don’t drink.” He tried not to sound rude.

“You don’t drink? I never met a kid your age that don’t drink. You’re bullshitting me, right?”

“No.”

The man lifted the beer bottle as if to toast to Pancho’s health and then he tilted his head back and drank the rest of it. He shook the empty bottle in the direction of the waitress. “What do you do for fun? You smoke weed? You must do something for kicks.”

The waitress came over with another beer. She looked at Pancho’s plate. “You didn’t like the food?”

“I wasn’t hungry,” he responded without looking at her.

“Hey, bring this guy a beer. Put it on my tab.”

“He ain’t twenty-one,” she told the fat man.

“Put it in one of them dark glasses and don’t make any foam when you pour it.” The man winked at the waitress. She made a face like she didn’t like the idea and went away. The man looked around as if to make sure no one was listening and then leaned across the table. “Let me give you a little piece of advice.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You shouldn’t flash your money like you did when you first came in. You never know, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, you’re right. You never know who’s watching.” Pancho tried to make it a joke, but it went over the man’s head. All day
long he had been struggling to understand what people were trying to tell him. It was a relief to finally know exactly what was going on.

“That’s right, man. There’s some bad elements here in Albuquerque.”

“Whereabouts?”

The man stopped with the beer halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“Whereabouts are the bad elements?” Pancho asked.

The waitress came and put a big plastic cup in front of him. He looked into it and saw the foamless beer.

“Drink up,” the man said, pointing at the plastic cup with his chin.

“Thanks, I don’t drink.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. The grin froze and then the lips tightened.
There,
Pancho thought,
there’s the hate.
“I’ll pay for it. And I’ll buy you another one,” Pancho added.

“It’s not polite to turn a person down when they buy you a beer. Around here, that’s an insult.”

“I don’t mean any insult,” Pancho said. “I don’t drink, that’s all.”

“Why the fuck not?” Droplets of spit landed on Pancho. He took a napkin from a dispenser on the side of the table and wiped his face. It came to him that this man might kill him before the evening was over. They would go outside and the man would want his money, and maybe the man had a gun tucked in his pants, or maybe the man would overpower him and strangle him before he had a chance to land a punch. He was amazed at how all right he was with any of those scenarios. It made him feel almost friendly toward the man, like here was someone he could talk to at last.

Pancho moved the beer to one side and put both of his elbows on the table. “There was this Anglo guy, his name was Jeff. He worked with my father at the Sears Auto Center back in Las Cruces. My dad was in charge of batteries and he changed the oil on cars and he patched flat tires. There was no one who could patch a flat or change a battery faster than my father. But he didn’t do any heavy-duty mechanic stuff. The guy Jeff did that.” The waitress had left behind his Coke and he took a sip. “My name is Pancho.” He stretched out his hand. “What’s yours?”

The man looked at the outstretched hand with suspicion. “They call me Billy Tenn,” he said, floating a fat hand toward Pancho, “’cause I’m a hillbilly from Tennessee.”

“Billy Tenn. Nice to meet you.” He sat back. The man seemed like he was anxious to hear the rest of the story. “This guy Jeff who used to work with my dad. He was an alcoholic. He wouldn’t like show up drunk at work, but he’d keep vodka in a big water bottle and he’d go through one of those every day, just sipping little sips all day long. My dad found out and talked to him about it, but this guy Jeff, he had five kids, the oldest one was maybe ten, and my father didn’t want to tell the supervisor about the guy’s drinking problem because then the guy would lose his job.” Billy Tenn leaned to the side of the chair and spit. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Pancho stopped talking.

“Go on, I’m listening,” Billy Tenn said, still clearing his throat.

“My dad used to come home and tell me about this guy Jeff. Every day the guy would make mistakes, and my dad had to cover up for him. He would forget to tighten bolts on tires or he’d be doing a safety inspection and forget to inspect the brakes. He
would have gotten fired except that my dad would constantly check up on him. My dad was doing two jobs really. Those little sips of vodka made the guy more and more careless every day.”

“You guys want anything else?” The waitress was standing beside them. She looked at the untouched glass of beer.

“How much do I owe you?” Pancho asked. “I’ll pay for him too.”

She took out a pad from the front of her apron and then fished around her ear for a pencil. She didn’t find a pencil, so she flipped the tiny pages from the pad and appeared to add the whole sum in her head. “Nineteen dollars even,” she said. “He had two beers before you got here.”

Pancho took out his wallet and gave her a twenty. “You want change?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She didn’t seem happy with this answer but slapped a one on the table. Billy Tenn’s eyes were glued on Pancho’s wallet. Pancho held the wallet in his hands a few moments before putting it back in his pocket. He looked at the waterfall clock. D.Q. was probably back in the hospital room by now. He wondered what D.Q. would do if Billy Tenn killed him and he never made it back. The kid was going to die in a few months, but Pancho would have beaten him to it.

“You mind?” Billy Tenn had finished with his bottle of beer and was now reaching for the plastic glass.

“Help yourself.” He thought that here he was, minding his pleases and thank-yous with this drunk, and he couldn’t bring himself to do so with D.Q.’s mother.

“Go ahead and finish your story ’cause I gotta have a smoke pretty soon. I left my smokes back in my car.”

“Go ahead. I’ll finish it when you get back.”

“I can wait.” He seemed afraid that Pancho would take off on him.

“There’s not much more to tell. One day, Jeff was working on one of those dump trucks they use to haul gravel to construction sites. He raised the bed to grease it and he asked my dad if he could lube the hydraulic arm that lifts the bed. So my dad went in there under the bed with the lube gun. Meanwhile, Jeff’s replacing a filter, only he’s not too stable because he’s been hitting the vodka like he always does, and he stumbles and on his way down, he grabs on to a hose. Turns out the hose fed hydraulic fluid to the arm that held up the truck bed. Without the fluid, the arm collapsed, and the truck bed fell on top of my father. His head, his chest, they were both crushed. They told me he probably didn’t even know what happened to him. They wouldn’t let me see his body.”

“Oooh, shit! That’s bad!” There was a look of half disgust and half laughter on Billy Tenn’s face, as if he had just imagined what the crushed head must have looked like.

Pancho stared at him. He kept staring until he could tell that the man was getting uncomfortable. Then he spoke again, almost in a whisper. “Ever since that day, I swore I wouldn’t drink.”

“Shit, man. That’s heavy.” Billy Tenn gulped the remainder of the beer. “Let’s go outside. I need a cigarette.”

“I’m not done yet.”

“What?”

“There’s another reason why I don’t drink and never will.”

“Man, I’d love to hear it, but I need to get me that cigarette.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What is it?”

“How much is point-zero-one milligrams of alcohol in a person’s blood?”

Billy Tenn, who had begun to stand up, sat down again.

“Shit, man, that’s not even one beer. I can tell you ’cause I’ve been DUI a couple of times, and you’re not even legally drunk unless you got point-oh-eight milligrams in you. We’re talking blood. Breath is different. Why’d you ask?”

“Something I read someplace. Not even one beer, huh?”

“It’s nothing, man. It’s the smallest amount that can be detected. I happen to be an expert on this, not ’cause I wanted to be.” Billy Tenn burped. “Excuuuse me.”

They sat there face-to-face, looking at each other. Then Pancho picked up his backpack and stood up. “You wanted to go outside? Let’s go.”

He stepped out first, the big man following him. “My car is out back,” Billy Tenn said. “That’s where I have my cigarettes.”

“All right.”

They walked side by side around the mall toward the back, where two brown Dumpsters stood open and overflowing with garbage. There were no cars parked back there. They were alone.

“I guess you know I need some money,” Billy Tenn said. “I’m sorry about your old man, man. Honest. But this is business.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess you’re not going to hand it over easy.”

“I can’t. Most of it is not mine. What’s mine I need.”

“I could probably let you keep some of it.”

“I can’t.”

Billy Tenn reached into his blue jeans and took out a shiny silver object. With a flick of his thumb, the object turned into a switchblade. Pancho moved the backpack to his left hand and raised it as a shield. Billy Tenn edged forward and began to make invisible circles with the switchblade. The sky was a dark blue, violet almost. A light on a pole by the Dumpsters flickered on. Pancho thought that if he got killed, he had nothing on him that would connect him to D.Q. The kid would be worried about him if he didn’t show up soon. Billy Tenn lunged at him. Pancho deflected the thrust with his backpack. He could hear the knife tear through the canvas and hoped it didn’t damage his sister’s diary. Billy Tenn began to breathe heavily. Pancho saw individual drops of sweat bead on his upper lip and on his forehead. Sooner or later, the sweat would flow into his eyes, and when it did, Pancho would make his move.