Last Summer of the Death Warriors (9 page)

He could not hold the backpack high enough. The knife came at him one more time. Billy Tenn grabbed the pack and tore it away from Pancho’s hand. There was a fixed smile on his face, a fake smile, like the smile on a Halloween mask. Then, with a speed that Pancho did not think possible for a heavy man, Billy Tenn feigned a thrust to one side and brought the blade sideways, cutting a line through Pancho’s shirt and across his chest. The sensation that raced through his flesh was almost delicate, what a laser burn would probably feel like. The blood soaked the white T-shirt before the cut began to burn.

“Give me the money. What you wanna die for?” Billy Tenn said.

The drop of sweat that Pancho had been watching rolled down Billy Tenn’s forehead and through his eyebrows and curved itself
inside the eye. Billy Tenn blinked and raised his hand to his eye. At that moment, Pancho flung his right arm forward as far as it would go. He heard the nose bone crack, a sound as light as the snap of a pencil breaking in half, but that was all it took. Pancho knew Billy Tenn’s brain was flooded with a white pain that blotted out all thought, all memory, all knowledge of past and future. He heard the knife drop and then the gagging and choking as the blood filtered down his nasal cavity to the throat. Now Billy Tenn was on his knees, and a second after that, he was doubled on the ground, holding his face and moaning. “Oh, oh. Oh. Ma nose. You broke ma nose.”

Pancho picked up the knife and tossed it toward the Dumpsters. He reached into Billy Tenn’s back pocket and lifted out his wallet with two fingers. He took out a twenty-dollar bill to reimburse himself for the beers and dropped the wallet on the ground. Then he grabbed the backpack with one hand, and with the other hand on his chest, he began the walk back to the hospital.

B
ack on Lomas Avenue, a few blocks from the restaurant, he took off the blood-soaked T-shirt, tore it, and tied it around the cut. Then he took his New Mexico State sweatshirt from the backpack and put that on. He went into a drugstore and bought a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a roll of gauze. Behind the drugstore, he looked at the slit across his chest. It was straight and thin, like the kind of mark his father used to make with a plumb line just before he sawed a long piece of wood. He poured the bottle of peroxide on the cut and tied the full roll of gauze around his chest as tight as he could. Then he walked very straight to keep himself from breathing deeply, because the cut was deep enough to hurt every time he did so. If he kept the cut closed, the bleeding would stop.

It was nine
P.M.
when he walked into the hospital. He looked at the front of the sweatshirt and made sure that blood had not seeped through. A sign said visiting hours ended at eight, but no one stopped him or even seemed to notice him.

D.Q. opened his eyes as soon as Pancho stepped into the room. “There you are,” he said, as if Pancho had just popped up in a dream he was having.

“Go back to sleep,” Pancho said. The only light in the room came from a table lamp next to D.Q.’s bed.

“I wasn’t asleep.” D.Q. groped around his bed until he found a remote control pinned to the upper part of the mattress. He pushed a button, and his torso tilted slowly up. “I like these beds,” he said. Then he pushed another button, and his feet went up.

Pancho went into the bathroom with his backpack and changed into a St. Anthony’s T-shirt and shorts. The gauze around his chest was only slightly pink. He came out and put the sweatshirt and blue jeans on the chair next to his bed. Then he jumped on top of the bed.

“Go ahead and turn on the TV if you want,” D.Q. said from the other side of the curtain.

Pancho crossed his arms. The pain from a knife cut was not as bad as the pain from a fist. He could feel the cut’s pain and still think. “Naah,” he said. He waited a few minutes, expecting D.Q. to ask him where he had been.

“I’ve been cleared for takeoff,” D.Q. announced.

“What?”

“They’re all set to start the treatments tomorrow.”

“We’re staying here then.”

“We’ll be moving into Casa Esperanza tomorrow afternoon. After the first treatment.”

“Mmm.” Pancho closed his eyes. A minute later he heard the curtain that separated his bed from D.Q.’s pull open. D.Q. was standing there in the funny nightgown. He went over to the chair
next to Pancho’s bed, placed the sweatshirt and blue jeans on the bed, and sat down. Apparently there was going to be more talking before the day was over. Pancho found it strange that this prospect did not bother him. Tonight, for some reason, there would be something comforting about listening to D.Q. Pancho tried to sit up, but the pain stopped him.

“Push the back of the bed up with that gizmo there on the table. You’ll be more comfortable that way.”

“I was hoping maybe I could get some sleep,” he said.

D.Q. tapped his index finger rapidly on his knee. He looked like he was sending a frantic telegraph message. Pancho folded his arms and shut his eyes tight. He knew that wouldn’t stop D.Q. from speaking. “You look like you sat on an anthill. What’s the matter?”

“Well…”

The reason for D.Q.’s uncharacteristic inability to talk came to him in a flash. Pancho smiled. “It’s the girl,” he said, putting a hand on his chest. “You’re worried about the girl. María.”

“Marisol,” D.Q. corrected him. Two red circles had appeared on his pale cheeks. Pancho had never seen anyone blush like that before. It was good to know that underneath all his highfalutin talk, D.Q. was just another regular kid.

“It’s not like that,” D.Q. said, recognizing what was behind Pancho’s smirk. “It’s different.”

“You wanna get laid.” He was going to say
before you croak,
but he stopped. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing through his nose because it was less painful.

“When you meet her tomorrow, you’ll understand,” D.Q. said with confidence.

“I understand,” Pancho muttered, still with his eyes closed. You could call it true love or whatever, but when you stripped the pretty words away, it boiled down to the same simple need. Then he remembered what D.Q. had said back in St. Anthony’s about coming to Albuquerque. He said something about Albuquerque being part of the preparations. “You came to Albuquerque to see her,” Pancho said with his eyes closed.

There was a long pause before D.Q. spoke. His tone was different, more personal. “I thought we would have more time before we tackled this subject. It may be too early for you to hear this. But I guess we have to grab the moment when it comes.” He stopped.

“Go ahead,” Pancho said. “I hear better with my eyes closed.” With luck, he would fall asleep while D.Q. talked.

“Okay. Here it goes. You’re half right. I didn’t have much choice about coming and participating in the clinical trials. Helen was dead set on it. That’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? ‘Dead set.’ I wonder where it came from? You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t fall asleep. This is important. What’s the matter, you have heartburn? Why do you keep making faces and touching your chest?”

“I get gas every time I hear you talk.”

“Ha-ha. I mean I had to come and let myself be a guinea pig even though I honestly don’t think anything good is going to come out of the treatments. Maybe a little more time, who knows? But you’re right, there was a part of me that
did
want to come to Albuquerque.”

“You wanna get laid,” Pancho said again.
I would want to get laid if I knew I was going to die,
he thought. And then he thought that he had come very close to dying that very night, not more than two hours before. He thought of Julieta, the only girl he had had a romantic experience with, if you could call it that. Immediately, he felt a longing. Something warm pushed its way out from his chest and floated up in the air.

D.Q. ignored his remark. “Remember that passage by Thoreau that I read to you and Father Concha on the way here?”

“The
meollo,”
Pancho said. “That’s what the girl Marisol is to you.”

He heard D.Q. laugh softly. “What if everyone is given a task we’re to work on and if possible complete while we’re living on this earth? What if before we are born and assigned bodies, all our souls stand up in a line in heaven, and as we get ready to come down, an angel gives us a little slip of paper that says what we have to do? Only the message is written in a language that we forget how to speak as soon as we get down here. But the message on that little piece of paper is still deep inside us, and our job is to remember, to recollect it, and then go about doing what it says.”

My task is to find Bobby,
Pancho said to himself, suddenly remembering.

“The task is different for everyone but it is also the same,” D.Q. continued. “That guy Thoreau went to the woods to find out what his task was. I came to Albuquerque.”

“Does she know you have the hots for her?”

“Must you be so crude?” Pancho couldn’t tell whether the anger in D.Q.’s voice was real or pretend. If it was real anger, that
was good too. The kid should come down to earth. “And no, I’ve never told Marisol how I feel about her and I’m not even sure I will. It doesn’t matter. When I’m around her, I’ll find out what I need to do.”

“Just being around her is not going to be the same as getting the
meollo.
You should try jumping in her pond instead of just walking around it.” That was a nice way of putting it, if he said so himself.

“Just wait until you meet her tomorrow. She’s not the type of person you can be crass about. But now that we’ve started this line of discussion, I want to continue it, in a responsible way if at all possible.”

“Yeah, let’s grab the moment by the balls.” What was the matter with him? It was like the slit on his chest had punctured his seriousness and now all kinds of pent-up silliness were coming out.

“What’s gotten into you? And what’s the matter with your chest, really?”

“I had a bad taco.”

“They brought you a tray of food here. Nice piece of baked chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes. I told them to leave it for you, but they took it away when you didn’t show up.”

“I went for a walk.” He was glad to have made it back, but he didn’t tell D.Q. that.

“Let me try to finish, okay? What if I kick the bucket tonight and you miss out on the wisdom I’m about to share with you? Thinking about all the things I think about would be a waste unless I pass them on to someone. All of this, by the way, is written down in the Death Warrior Manifesto. But it’s better if you get it firsthand, straight from the source.”

Pancho felt the weight of sleep touch his eyelids. Good. Sleep was going to come despite the pain. “Make it quick,” he said. “I’m getting sleepy.”

“Listen, I got to tell you this.” D.Q. spoke faster. “The task that was given to me, my message on that little piece of paper, it has to do with Marisol. She’s the one. I know that’s where the main business is going to take place because that’s where I’m most scared to go. And for some unknown reason, it has to do with you too.”

“Shit,” Pancho said, half asleep. He wished he hadn’t been thrown into the group, but he didn’t think he could do too much about it. Not just then anyway.

“It’s not like I’m terribly happy about it either. Look at me. What am I supposed to hope for with Marisol? Do we fall in love and I die a couple of months later? And what if we do fall in love? What does that love look like? How am I supposed to act around her? I have no idea. I’m clueless here. And look at you. I’m sharing my most vulnerable secrets with you and you’re snoring.”

There was a pause. It could have been a minute or it could have been an hour. Then Pancho felt someone tug at his feet and in a dream, he saw D.Q. untie the laces of his red sneakers and take them off his sweaty feet. He got those sneakers one day at the mall when Rosa wanted to buy him a birthday present. She took three ten-dollar bills out of her Mickey Mouse wallet and paid for them, and she giggled and said that now he looked like Goofy. Then he felt the softness of a blanket cover him and he sank into a darkness that was not lonely.

S
he’s nothing to write home about.
Those were the words that flashed through his mind when he first saw Marisol. She was standing at the entrance to Casa Esperanza, holding the hand of a bald-headed girl. He and D.Q. had just gotten out of the blue hospital van, and D.Q. tugged at his arm. “That’s her, that’s her,” he whispered.

She waved and started toward them, pulling the girl behind her. “D.Q.!” she exclaimed when she was halfway down the front path. Then she let go of the girl’s hand and embraced D.Q. It was a warm embrace, the kind you give a friend you haven’t seen for a long time.

D.Q. muttered, shocked, “You remember me.”

“Sure, why wouldn’t I?” Her voice overflowed with energy and humor. Pancho had never heard a voice like that coming out of a teenage girl.

“It’s been awhile,” D.Q. said, his own voice trembling.

“Can you take me to the jungle gym?” The bald girl lifted her
arms, waiting for Pancho to pick her up. Pancho looked down at her, frozen in place.

“You must be Pancho,” Marisol said, smiling. To Pancho’s questioning look, she said, “Father Concha came yesterday to drop off your things. He told me both of you would be coming.” Then she knelt and spoke directly to the girl. “Tell Pancho your name and ask him nicely if he will take you to the playground.”

“My name is Josie. Can you take me to the playground? Please.” She held out her hand.

Pancho looked at Marisol and then at D.Q. and then back at Marisol. “I think she wants you to hold her hand,” Marisol informed him.

“Where’s the jungle gym?” he said to the girl. He kept his hands by his side.

“It’s back there.” Josie pointed toward the back of the house.

“Finally, you met your match.” D.Q. tried to sound upbeat, but his voice was weak. Marisol took D.Q.’s arm and led him toward the front door.

“Come on, I’ll show you where your room is,” Marisol said to him.

Casa Esperanza was a sprawling Mexican-style adobe house with green cactus and small trees surrounding it. Pancho imagined it was the kind of house that was naturally warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

“Are you going to live here?” the girl asked. She grabbed his hand and led him toward the back of the house.

“Yeah,” Pancho said. “Shouldn’t you have a hat on or something?” The top of her head still had a few strands of fine, light brown hair.

“It’s okay,” she said. “The sun is good for me. It has vitamin D.”

Behind the house stood two wooden jungle gyms with yellow canvas pup tents on the top platforms. Four large cottonwoods covered the playground with luscious shade. There was no one else there. Josie let go of Pancho’s hand and began to climb up a ladder on one side but stopped on the second rung. “Can you help me get up there?” Pancho grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up to the top rung. She went into the tent and then poked her round head out. “You have to come up,” she told him.

“I’ll wait for you over there,” he said, pointing at the wooden fence.

“No, I’m scared. You need to come up here.”

What was it about cancer that made people so bossy? He climbed up the ladder and sat next to her, gathering his knees to his chest. He looked to see if there was blood on the front of his T-shirt. “What are you looking at?” he said irritably when he felt her penetrating eyes on him. “Don’t you have parents?”

“They’re taking a break from me.” She took her finger and began to poke him in the arm as if trying to determine whether he was real or not. “I didn’t let them get hardly any sleep last night.”

“Stop that.” He flinched his arm away.

She floated her hand in front of her, wiggled her fingers, and then snapped her thumb and her middle finger. She did it again. “Guess what this is?” Wiggle and snap. Wiggle and snap.

“I have no idea.”

“It’s a butterfly with hiccups!” she squealed, and then repeated the procedure with her hand. “Get it?”

“Why don’t you go down the slide or something?”

“I like it up here. It’s cool. Get it? It’s cool.”

“How old are you anyway?”

“I’m eight and three-quarters,” she said, suddenly turning serious. “People think I’m younger when they first see me. But then when they hear me talk, they think I’m older.” She turned out the palms of her hands and tilted her head sideways. “Go figure.”

“Go figure,” he said. He saw the leaves flutter outside and then felt a breeze. In the distance he could see the green grass of a golf course. He was surprised to find so much green. The picture of Albuquerque that had begun to form in his mind consisted of ugly buildings dumped on top of miles of asphalt and cement.

“My real name is Josefina,” she said. “I don’t mind people calling me Josie. Which do you like better, Josie or Josefina?”

“Neither,” he said. He tried to remember when he last thought about Bobby. It seemed like a long time ago. When was it? When he went out for a walk last night? When he sat in the restaurant, before the fight? The next time he went with D.Q. to the hospital, he would get the revolver and bring it here. He would hide it there on the edge of the golf course. He wanted the gun to be always accessible.

“I like Josefina when my grandma calls me that, but I like everyone else to call me Josie. My grandma doesn’t speak English. Her name is Josefina also. Do you have a grandma?”

“Nope.”

“She died?”

“Probably.”

“I have one grandma and two grandpas that already died.” She held up one finger on one hand and two fingers on the other. Then she moved all the fingers on her right hand like she was saying bye-bye to someone.

What was taking Marisol so long? But then again, she never said that she was going to come and get the girl. Maybe he had been suckered into taking care of her for the rest of the afternoon. What else was there to do? He needed to start looking for Bobby with the red truck, but that required a phone booth with a phone book.

“Are there telephones in the rooms?” he asked the girl.

“Nope.”

“How about TVs?”

“No, but there’s a big TV in a room with a carpet and comfy sofas and chairs. And there’s lots of movies you can watch. My favorite is
Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Have you seen that?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s seen that. Is that all they have, kids’ shows?”

“Mostly. Usually the kids watch TV and the grown-ups sit in the dining room having coffee and talking about the kids. Are you a grown-up or a kid?” She examined him.

“What do you think I am?” he said testily.

“Mmmm. Let me think. You are a…big kid!” She thought that was extremely funny.

“Is that girl Marisol gonna come get you any time soon?”

“Marisol is my second best friend. My first best friend is Donna. She has leukemia too.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can she be your best friend if you don’t even know where she is?”

“She just left, that’s all. Silly.” She banged on his thigh with her closed hand. When he looked down, she was wrinkling her nose and puckering her lips as if she had just smelled something bad. “Who’s your best friend?”

He was going to say “no one,” but he stopped himself. Was D.Q. a friend now? Can a person be your friend if you don’t understand what he’s saying most of the time? What if you’re not even sure you like him? What if you’re sleeping in the same room? What if he’s pretty much about the only other human being you have regular contact with?

The girl seemed to detect his trouble in coming up with an answer. “Marisol can be your best friend too if you want. She’s a lot of kids’ best friend. I don’t mind. I think Marisol is pretty, don’t you?”

Nothing to write home about,
he thought. Not that he had anyone at home to write to. He didn’t even have a home. He tried to remember Marisol’s face. On second thought, maybe she
was
pretty. She wasn’t beautiful like the nurse Rebecca, but there was something about her. “I didn’t notice,” he finally said.

“Marisol is taking me to the zoo. Maybe tomorrow if I don’t feel sick. You can come too if you want. I saw a picture of the zoo. They have lizards and all kinds of poisonous snakes. I like scary animals the best. What’s your favorite animal?”

He used to have a dog whose name was Capitán, but they called him Capi for short. Unfortunately, Capi liked to rummage in the neighbors’ trash cans, sometimes spilling the contents on the
street. They used to get anonymous notes on their front door telling them “The dog will meet a fateful end unless he’s reined.” His father had to look at an old dictionary to figure out some of the words. They figured that the only person who’d use words like that was Mr. Rafferty, an old man who lived in a sparkling trailer at the end of the park. It was the same Mr. Rafferty who drove by one day when his father was hoisting up the flag and yelled out the window of his station wagon that Mexicans had no business flying the American flag. That was the only time Pancho had seen his father yell at another person in anger. “I served this country too and got wounded for it, you ignorant old fart! Don’t tell me I can’t fly my flag. What the hell’s the matter with you?” Old Mr. Rafferty sped away.

A week later, they found Capi dead under their trailer, a puddle of vomit next to his mouth. His father never said anything, but Pancho knew old Mr. Rafferty had poisoned him.

He snapped back to the present. “Dogs,” he said. “I like them best.”

“Guess what? Once I get through with the treatments and I start getting well again, I’m going to get a puppy.”

The idea of revenge for Capi’s poisoning had never even crossed his mind. It would have been so easy to spray the old man’s trailer with graffiti or pour sugar down the gas tank of his white Cadillac. It was strange that not only did Pancho and his father not talk about revenge, they didn’t even think about it. It was as if the option of revenge did not exist, could not even be imagined. How strange that a feeling once so foreign to him now gripped him with such persistence. He could not imagine living without avenging his sister’s death.

“They have Bengal tigers and polar bears all in the same zoo right next to each other, but polar bears like it cold and tigers like it really hot. Maybe they have an air conditioner for the bears.”

A flock of blackbirds descended in a blur and landed on the branches of the cottonwood closest to them. They chirped and cawed chaotically. Josie stuck her fingers in her ears and shut her eyes. For a moment it sounded as if they were inside a ball of cracking ice. Josie hid her face against his chest, and Pancho automatically put his arm around her. Then there was the simultaneous flutter of a hundred wings, and the birds burst out of the tree as fast as they had come.

“Ayyy!” Josie cried out. “That was scaaary!” She was still holding on to him.

“Okay, okay,” he said. He pried her fingers from his ribs. “Let’s get down. They’re liable to come back and eat you up.”

“Really?” Her eyes lit up with delight.

“Yeah, birds love little bald heads that look like eggs.”

“Let’s slide down.” A yellow S-shaped tube connected to the edge of the tent functioned as a slide. Josie crawled to the edge and then sat down. “You have to come with me,” she commanded.

“You go ahead, I’ll follow you.”

“No, you have to hold me because I’m afraid.”

“What are you afraid of? It’s just a slide.”

“I’m afraid of being inside closed spaces. I’m closophobic.”

That’s another thing that cancer people have in common,
he thought.
They like to use big words.