Wanted (29 page)

I stand outside Lillian’s bedroom, leaning my head against the door.
Maybe she’s got something
.
I’ll pay her back.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, walking in the bedroom. I start with the dresser drawers, making my way through her room like I would a house on our list. I look under the mattress, behind the headboard, in the not-so-secret panel in the back. I run my fingers along the base of her bed frame. I look behind the mirror on her dresser and run my hand along the base of the dresser, too. Nothing.

Her closet is impeccable. Three pairs of shoes from Payless—brown, black, and blue—all in a row. Practical. Inexpensive. I think about my shoe collection, Josh’s words, and cringe.
Focus.
In the back of her closet, there’s a shoe box, tucked behind some ancient Christmas ornaments. I pull it down and open it up. I flip through her Mexican passport, staring at the picture of the girl in the black-and-white photo. She looks so young. She looks like me. There are some letters—in Spanish—Mom’s birth certificate, a medallion of a saint. I hold it up and look close, squinting to see which saint. Saint Jude. I’ll have to look it up, so I pocket it. I can use all the help I can get.

I’m about to put the shoe box back up when I notice there’s a funny bump on the lid. I pull away at the loose cardboard and find a savings account book. I do a double take. It has my name on it. I flip through the book. Every month, since I was born, she’s deposited between twenty-five and fifty dollars. I now have nearly eight thousand dollars. Money Lillian’s saved for me for college. Money she’s
not
spent on herself to buy shoes.

A knot of sorrow fills my throat. I placed my bets without having all the information. “I will pay you back,” I whisper. I hold the savings book in my hands—its pages worn and fuzzy at the sides. Seventeen years of saving for me, my future. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

My phone beeps again. Leonard. I listen to the message. “Tonight, Mike. Or things are gonna get ugly.”

I’m the last to slip through the door before the bank locks up. When I withdraw the money, the teller doesn’t even blink. She just says, “Do you want to close the account?”

“No. Can I leave ten dollars in it? For now?”

“Sure. Buying a car?”

“Yeah,” I say. “A car.”

She smiles and hands me the money. “Drive safe.”

I drive up to Reno, tapping the money, Lillian’s money, against my thigh. I rub Saint Jude between my thumb and forefinger, wondering where I’ll get the money to pay Lillian back, thinking about the games this week. I just have to bet smarter.

Two points. One shot. One. Stinking. Shot.

After I leave Leonard’s place, I stand outside. A nearby parking lot is filled with men hanging out, looking for a day’s work. I look at my watch. Way too late. And I don’t have anything to give them.

Lying. Hiding. Falling. Nowhere to land.

3D living overrated. Too late now.

Chapter 45

AT SCHOOL, IT’S LIKE JOSH

and I don’t know each other—don’t even live on the same planet. How can he
not
wonder about Leonard? How can he
not
be worried that I’m in deep shit and he’s just sitting pretty, going to tuxedo fittings after school for another tea or whatever?

After school, I end up at Moch’s house.

Moch is standing outside on a crooked ladder, fixing the screen. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His hair isn’t slicked back; he’s not wearing sunglasses. He almost looks normal—like a regular high school senior stuck fixing his parents’ window on a Thursday afternoon.

I can’t sit still. I can’t think.

Mr. Mendez gives me a giant hug and hands me two Cokes; I pass one up to Moch. He wipes his head with his forearm, cracks open the can of Coke, and takes deep gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Pa takes the bus up to Reno in the mornings. Right now it’s like every business, contractor, and industry in Nevada has gone licit.”

“Licit. Good word.”

“Not always,” Moch says.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

Everything
.

That should be my six-word memoir: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

He climbs down the ladder and sits on the bottom rung, finishing off the last of his Coke. “It’s hot. Too hot for March. Gonna be a dry summer. Lots of fires, I’m guessing.”

I shrug and shiver. I don’t feel the warmth, just a piece of ice. I sit next to him in his lawn chair, sipping on my Coke. Cold sweat prickles the back of my neck.

“Where’ve you been?” Moch asks. “You don’t come by much.”

“Just busy, I guess.”

“Ellison? You two together or something?”

“No.” It sounds so final and my voice catches.

Moch nods. I can’t tell if he looks relieved or disappointed or is slipping back into monosyllabic Moch.

“Staying for dinner?” Moch asks.

I look at the trailer house. It’s a was home. Its past smells and tastes and sounds lost under a blanket of death and sadness. “I dunno,” I say. Moch goes into the house and comes back out with two more Cokes.

The Coke fizzles; perspiration beads on the can. The sun lowers in the sky. The air cools. We sit together, listening to neighbors fight, TVs on full blast, the boom of somebody’s bass, the sound of a baby crying. Barefoot kids run up and down the street chasing lizards and beating them with sticks. A lizard scurries across the lawn, and Moch whispers, “You’d better hide, little dude.”

Boredom kills. Literally.

I inhale. The neighborhood smells deep-fried, dusty. It’s a tumbleweed haven.

Moch takes a big drink and hiccups when he comes up for air. “I went to that doctor’s house. I had a gun.”

It takes a second to digest what he’s said. I rub my arms. I try to read Moch’s expression in the shadows. He pauses, tapping his fingers on the can, drumming an aluminum rhythm. I listen.

“He was alone, sitting outside reading. I saw him there
alive
and
reading
. Like he had no right to be there at all. I walked up to him, gun in my pocket. He saw me. He didn’t run or cry or anything. He asked me to sit down. I did. You know, I was so ready to kill him. He knew I was going to kill him, too. It was like he had been sitting there, reading in that stupid fucking porch swing, waiting for me to come.

“I asked, ‘What are you reading?’ You know what he showed me?”

I shake my head.

“
The Gambler
.
¡Joder!
So I couldn’t kill him because he was reading your book. How’s that? So I got up to go. He said, ‘Why didn’t you do it?’

“I say, ‘Once more I looked around me like a conqueror—once more I feared nothing.’ Yeah. I quote from
The Gambler
. And he’s like, ‘You’ve read it?’ But he doesn’t say it in a surprised way like some
pendejo
. He says it like he wants to talk about it. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘it’s this book my friend always quotes from, so I picked it up.’ It’s like we’re in some kind of book club. I couldn’t believe it. I have this gun. Ready to kill him. And now I’m about ready to sit down for tea and scones and a book talk, and it hits me. The whole thing hits me and I’m just blown away because I don’t know what to hope for outside of these tattoos and all the other shit I’m caught up in. I don’t know what I’m fighting for. I don’t even know who I’m fighting.

“So my legs give out on me, and I collapse on his lawn and cry and cry and he comes over and hugs me like some kind of
joto
. And we cry together. All because of
The Gambler
.”

Moch runs his arm across his nose and finishes off his second can of Coke. The sky is blotchy purple, the first stars shining.

“What are you hoping for?” I ask.

Moch crushes the second can and holds the two together like cymbals, clacking the aluminum, making a tinny, ringing sound. “I’ve been working on that—to figure that out—real hard, you know. I’m even doing homework and shit—so I can maybe graduate. Get out of here.”

“And?” I ask. Maybe he can give me a tip. Something to hope for beyond surviving the week. How quickly things change—I’m him, he’s me.

Does he see that?

The lizard genocide has come to an end; the neighborhood kids have been called in for dinner. A pizza delivery truck drives by, honking at a couple hollering at each other in the street.

Dinnertime.

“I’m going to Indiana,” he says.

“Indiana? When? Why?”

“We’ve come into some money.” Moch stares at me.

I look away.

He continues. “Pa has a friend, Gary, who rebuilds motors in old cars and then sells them. He’s going to train me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find myself a nice little wife there—go green, you know.” He winks.

“I’ll marry you, Moch,” I say before I realize what I’ve said, and my whole body turns that purplish-red-right-after-the-sun-dips-down-behind-the-horizon color.

He wraps his arm in mine, his copper skin over my can’t-decide-what-to-be skin I have going on under a spray of a thousand freckles. He leans over and gives my cheek a kiss. “Thanks, Mike. But you deserve more. You’re going places.”

Like prison.
But I don’t say that, because then I’d be the big disappointment all around.

“What about your dad?” I ask.

Moch exhales. “I don’t know. But I know I’m not doing him any good around here.”

“The restaurant?”

“Some dreams die.”

“You’ll do good there, you know?” I swallow back my embarrassment. “I mean. You’ll be good at building motors—or anything.”

“Yeah. I figure I’ve managed these
cabrones
for the past two years.” He points to the la Cordillera tattoo on his arm. “I’ll probably be able to manage building some motors and starting a
licit
business.” He picks up my cans of Coke. “Recycling.”

I grin. “So not only will you have a licit business, but you’ll also save the world.”

“Something like that.” He winks.

“What does the gang think?”

Moch puts his forefinger to his lips. “They don’t know.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me, too.”

I get up to go. “See you at school tomorrow. Tell your dad thanks for the Cokes, okay?” I walk to my car, feeling a little better about Moch.

Moch smiles, though the sadness in his eyes remains. “Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re up to, it has to stop. You know that, right?”

If it were anybody else, I’d play dumb—put on my bookie face and say the right thing. But not with Moch. “It’ll stop,” I say. “This weekend.”

Moch stands and stretches. He heads inside. I watch him go up the lopsided front porch stairs and kick on the wobbly steel. Something else for him to fix before he goes.

Moch found the path I lost.

Chapter 46

Sanctuary 4:30 Mills Park

WE GATHER AT THE SKATE

park. “Place your bets, guys,” I say, pulling out my betting book, scanning the crowd, hoping to see Josh. I lost that bet, too.

“Mike, aren’t you forgetting something?” Javier asks.

“Yeah, Mike. C’mon, you’re gonna totally mess with my luck,” Tim says.

I look at the group. “What?”

“A little
Gambler
to set the mood?”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” I inhale, and only one quote comes to me.

Oh, you self-satisfied persons who, in your unctuous pride, are forever ready to mouth your maxims—if only you knew how fully I myself comprehend the sordidness of my present state, you would not trouble to wag your tongues at me!

“Well, that was a downer. Geez, Mike, what’s your problem?” Tim laments.

“C’mon, guys. Lay off.” Seth has come to make his biannual bet. He never misses March Madness Final Four or finals.

“You bummed about BYU?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Nah. I was banking on Arizona.”

“Good choice,” I say.

They place their bets. I act normal, like some lady’s not almost dead because of me.

Mission accomplished.

But the mission kind of got blurry. I wonder if this is how the Crusades began—a couple of conversations about why my religion is better than yours, then a few hundred years of slaughter. Just a giant misunderstanding.

Mrs. Brady is out of critical condition and is semi-conscious. As far as I know, though, she hasn’t said anything about Josh—about us. The governor is going gung-ho, pleading through the media for information regarding the dangerous duo Babylonia. We’ve gone from sainthood to Judas with the flip of a coin.

Because of her, I’m thinking about all the houses, all the robberies, doubting us, what we did.

Maybe we were wrong all along.

How did right and wrong get so hazy? How come I couldn’t see this coming? I lie down on a bench, the sun long set, the cold seeping through my clothes, skin, until I can’t tell where the bench ends and my back begins. I listen to the skateboarders’ whirring wheels, the scrape of the bottoms of boards across concrete jumps, the clatter of boards when they flip.

“You’ll get pneumonia,” Josh says, draping his jacket over me. A faint smell of nutmeg clings to it along with the familiar fabric softener and pine. He sits at the end of the bench. I keep my eyes closed. He talks. “I had to give them the money. I just had to do something. I panicked and felt hopeless. I’m so sorry.”

I lie there, my back frozen, my front warm from Josh’s jacket. I can’t speak to him, though, because he left me when I needed him. Big-time. He left me to deal with Leonard. It’s like my voice box has frozen, too.

“My dad fired them,” Josh says. “Mr. Mendez and all the others. The investigations, the feds looking into Ellison Industries’ employment records. He fired them all. About twenty that I know of.”

I already knew. Mr. Mendez is riding up to Reno every morning to look for work.

“I found out last week,” he says. “Dad was talking about it to his lawyer. His lawyer said it was time to stop
thinking outside the bun
. So my dad totally lost his cool then, you know. Telling his lawyer that he was a racist son of a bitch, blahblahblah. And his lawyer said, ‘With all due respect, I’m not the one employing them.’”