Salvation (11 page)

Which was a lie.

“Is there something I should know, Salvador?” His father’s voice was calm, the tone used when expecting a truthful answer. If there was anything more important to
Papá
than education, it was honesty.

Salva felt his throat tighten. He could tell his father about the Ivy League applications, but what would be the point? Deep down, Salva kind of wanted to know if he could get in. Just for the sake of knowing. But even if he won every local five-hundred and thousand-dollar scholarship, he couldn’t afford one of those schools. And
Papá
didn’t need to feel bad about not being able to send his son anywhere he wanted to go. Plus, there was no point having the whole what-do-you-mean-you-want-to-move-to-the-East-Coast argument.

“No,” Salva answered his father, then took a bite of the salad and almost wept.
Jesús Cristo.
The peppers were hot.

Winter featured snow, freezing rain, and three months of cold wind that would have stripped the wings off every butterfly in Salva’s birth state of Michoacán. Then March rolled in with a pile of ditched snow tires and the mingled odors of solvent, oil, and grease.

Salva sat on a stack of new tires in the machine shop. The place had an overflow of work. Which meant Tosa had had to come in to help his old man even on a Sunday afternoon. And Pepe had magnanimously decided he and his best friend should go along. To provide a distraction.

Fortunately, the owner almost never stuck his head out of the office. And Tosa’s father, who was out back most of the time anyway, didn’t have enough English to follow the shop talk. “So what’s the deal with the blonde?” Pepe asked, leaning casually against a busted-up fender. He flicked a string of aluminum bottle tops at Tosa, who was defenseless on a creeper under a dented-up Chevy. “Any action yet?”

In Pepe’s vocab, action required all four bases.

Metal clanged from under the car, followed by soft swearing and a squeal as the rollers of the creeper shifted. “We’re off for the moment,” Tosa said.

“Man, you weren’t ever on.” Pepe smirked.

Tosa’s hand came out from under the vehicle and patted the ground, about a foot from a half-inch wrench. Salva got up and handed over the tool, then went back to his perch.

“What about you, Real?” The question shot from under the Chevy. “You’re the one with the steady girlfriend.” There came the sound of metal screeching against the floor.

Salva cringed. After all the years he’d spent as Char’s protector, he wasn’t too keen on hearing about his best friend’s exploits with her.

Pepe lifted a bad bolt from the discard can. “Yeah, well, we aren’t wasting our time. It’d be a hell of a lot easier, though, if Mr. Super Genius over here”—he chucked the bolt in Salva’s direction—“didn’t keep leaving his little sisters at the place for Char to babysit.”

Salva caught the bolt and flung it back. There better
not
be any action while his sisters were over there.

“Speakin’ of whom,” Pepe added, “what’s up with you, Resendez? I ain’t seen you with a chick all winter. You turnin’ into the pope or something?”

Salva knew his dearth of a sex life was crazy. He hadn’t been dateless for this long since he’d entered Liberty High, but—well,
he kept having dreams about the wrong girl.

Tosa rolled out from under the Chevy and chucked a half-dozen bottle caps back at Pepe. “Better watch yourself, Real! You wouldn’t want to wind up stuck here with Charla while Resendez cleans up all the college girls next fall.”

Salva grinned and tossed his tall friend a water bottle. “You mean,
both
you and I clean them up; right, Tos?”

“Nah.” Tosa unscrewed the lid and gulped about half the contents of the bottle, then stared down into it. “I’m not going to college.”

“What?” Pepe came off the fender.

“Um…” Tosa screwed on the bottle lid, then unscrewed it again. “I’m thinkin’ maybe the army.”

A hail of bolts fell from Pepe’s fingers. “What the H would you wanta do that for?”

Salva didn’t care much for the idea either—the thought of his big, easygoing friend killing someone. But then—short of a trade school, which there was no way Tosa’s family was going to be able to afford—the military was a real option.

The tall guy looked up at Salva as if for approval. “Well, it’d be easier, you know.”

Meaning the whole citizenship process.
There was no way either of Tosa’s parents was going to pass the English test before he turned eighteen. Though, as Salva saw it, there were a heck of a lot better ways to become a citizen than to get yourself killed. But he didn’t have a right to talk. His father had passed
the test two years ago, and Salva didn’t have to deal with the whole visa mess.
Lucky.
He knew that. Just one more thing he owed
Papá
, because Salva never could have applied for the same scholarships if he’d had to fill in the wrong bubble on all those forms.

He slid off the tires and clapped Tosa on the back. “The army’d be lucky to have you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pepe demanded.

Salva knew his best friend was still under the illusion the three of them were going to spend the next four years together. Which wasn’t going to happen. No way Tosa would have gotten into a better school than Community. And Salva had already received a yes from Regional at least, not that Regional was at the top of his list.

He and Pepe needed to talk.

But not here. And not now. What was needed now was action.

“It means,” Salva said, “I bet they could use a half-decent mechanic.” He glanced around behind him. No sign of the shop owner. Or Tosa’s father. “Especially one we’ve primed so well for battle, don’t you think?” Salva picked up a grease rag, wadded it tight, and hurled it at Pepe.

“Oh, man,” Pepe said, ducking the rag and crouching down behind the busted fender, “are you sure you wanta go there?”

“Definitely,” Tosa answered instead, snagging the box of remaining rags and dodging behind the fresh stack of tires.

Which meant Salva had to dive for cover behind the cabinet by the open office door.

“Incoming!” Pepe shouted, and what followed was a barrage: aluminum cans, bottle tops, rags, the empty water bottle, a container of glue, lubricant. The rules were simple. No nuts, bolts, or wrenches. Nothing that would leave a hole in your head. And when you ran out of stuff to throw, you were out.

Salva gave up first. The other guys, closer to each other, kept trading ammo.

During a brief lull in the combat, he heard the customer bell ring and moved to close the door, but he paused as he caught sight of the hopeless look on Tosa’s father’s face. The owner, who should have been manning the desk, must have slacked off early. Salva stepped through the doorway and shut out the sounds of renewed warfare.

Señor Tosa was the inverse of his son, nearly as tall but scary skinny and a total introvert. He was also a brilliant mechanic. But no way was he going to be able to follow the diatribe being flung at him from the guy who’d just entered the shop.

The customer, a white guy maybe in his thirties, though it was hard to tell under the patchy facial hair, railed away about his Jeep losing horsepower. The damn thing had been running fine, he claimed, when he’d got it two months ago. He plucked at his tight T-shirt, not a good look on a guy with a gut, then slammed his chewed-up baseball cap down on the counter and demanded a quote.

“En-engine no work.” Señor Tosa glanced nervously toward the yellow invoices by the hat.

“What the hell you think I’ve been sayin’?” The customer spat a wad of chew onto the floor.

Real classy.
“Just a sec,” Salva said to the jerk, then turned and did his best to translate the problem without wasting his breath.

“Change oil?” Señor Tosa asked.

The customer was turning purple. “What do I look like, some teenager?”

I’m guessing you’ve trashed a lot more vehicles than I have.

“Air filter?” asked Tosa’s father.

The guy scoffed and hitched his thumbs through his belt loops.

Señor Tosa dropped into Spanish.

“If the air filter was installed incorrectly,” Salva translated, “the dirt might come straight in and damage the engine.”

The customer folded his arms over his chest. “I don’t wanta know what this grease rag”—he jerked his head at Señor Tosa—“thinks I might’ve done wrong; I wanta know what he’s gonna do to fix the problem. And how much it’s gonna cost me.”

How about some time in anger management? Or maybe with an antibiotic.
A circle on the guy’s arm looked suspiciously like ringworm.

Señor Tosa explained that he would have to check out the engine first.

“So you’re saying you can’t do your job?” the other man griped.

Salva wished he could send a silent message to the mechanic.
Just let him take his beer gut somewhere else and see how fast he gets a quote on a Sunday.

Señor Tosa, his face blank, asked for the man’s phone number, promising to call back with the quote by four o’clock.

The customer seemed to get over himself long enough to reel off his number, which Salva scribbled down on one of the yellow invoices.

The guy swiped up his hat and stomped toward the door.

“We’ll need the keys,” Salva called after him.

The man spat again. Then he dug into his jeans pocket, pulled out an object, and sent it spiraling in a lousy throw. Salva caught the key.

“You tell your real boss,” the guy said to him, “I’m talkin’ to someone who speaks
English
on the phone, not this Spanish flunky. This is America.”

And the guy walked out.

Salva still hadn’t gotten the anger out of his head by the next afternoon as he entered the cardboard forest that now filled the multipurpose room. Rows of wooden stands with corrugated tree trunks and boughs covered in paper leaves stood in his way. He burst past one, knocked it down, and sent dozens of leaves blowing in every direction.

“Careful!” Beth gasped from the stage. “That’s the forest for the spring production. They’re not dry.”

Yeah, well, he’d figured that out a little late.

He reached for the sundered foliage and got his palm covered in glue.
Ugh!

Beth came forward with a wet towel and reached for his hand.

He tugged away, grabbing the towel more brusquely than he should have.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Yeah, something was wrong. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Which bugged the hell out of him.

He wiped his hand.

She stood there, just waiting at first, then crouched down and began to pick up the ruined leaves. “What is it?”

She doesn’t want to know.
No one ever wanted to know. And the people who did know—his father, Señor Tosa, Señora Mendoza—they all preached the same silent mantra.
Poner la otra mejilla
. Sometimes he hated the friggin’ Catholic Church!

“Salva?”

“This is America!” The words burst out before he had a clue he was going to say them.

“Oh”—Beth paused in her leaf gathering and grinned up at him—“is it?”

Exactly.
“What makes people think I need to hear it?!” He whirled and crossed through a row of drying trees, separating her from his anger. “Or that anyone needs to hear it?”

The tone of her voice sobered. “It’s a defense, I guess. For people who are scared.”

He kicked the wooden stand of another tree without thinking, then reached out to rescue it. More leaves tumbled. “Of what?” He found it really hard to believe that the jerk at the machine shop had been scared of Tosa’s father.

“Of their own ignorance.”

The tree trunk was vibrating.
She was right.
He knew she was right, though he’d never heard anyone put it that way before.

“Who said it?” she asked.

And the vibrating stopped. He realized he didn’t even know the name of the idiot.

Sighing, Salva bent down to pick up the mess.

She eased a garbage can, already half filled with discarded leaves, in his direction. “Tell me.”

“You don’t want to hear about it.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

He stared at her. His mother had been like that. She’d never asked a question without wanting to know the answer. Beth—well—he didn’t have to impress her. And she didn’t come with all the baggage that was in his family. Plus, nothing was too “out there” or “over her head.” Or too deep. She seemed to operate on a plane of feeling.

Salva stretched for a distant leaf, then found himself spilling: the details of the conversation in the machine shop, the thousand other times he’d heard that stupid comment about
America, and all his own logical arguments against it—that
America
included Latin America, that English was the native language of England, that no one who’d never learned a second language had the right to judge.

“You’re right,” Beth said when he was done. No arguments. Or vacillations.

He felt like he could breathe for the first time all day.

She was silent for maybe a minute, then asked, “Have you read “Ending Poem” by Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales?”

Random.
He wiped up the floor with the wet towel.

“It’s by Puerto Rican writers,” she continued, “about celebrating all the cultures that make us who we are. It’s kind of awesome.”

Which was so Beth. Telling him to read a poem. As if real people could just work out all their problems through literature. Like the characters in a book.

Well, maybe not in the plays he’d been reading for AP English:
Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello.
Salva stood up and draped the soiled towel over the edge of the water fountain. Sometimes heroes didn’t solve anything. Sometimes they died.

The young man in front of Beth, his hair tousled, shirt loose, taking out his vengeance on paper trees, was not the Salva she knew. Though she’d had fair warning. He had slammed his locker door, loudly, between first and second period. And
everyone
had stared.

“Looks like something’s blown the god’s cool,” Ni had joked at the time.