Muchacho (13 page)

Beecher gave me a good grade on that journal and she wrote on the side of the paper, “Watch out for stereotypes, but thank you for making me smile, Eddie,” so maybe she would remember that smile. But it could be that she forgot all about me as soon as she stopped being my teacher. Just because you remember somebody real good doesn’t mean they remember you back.

Before, I was thinking I would put my journal in the library drop box so Beecher could read all those serious pages that I wrote and never turned in for a grade because I didn’t want her to know too much personal stuff about me. And I’d put one of my poems on the last page. But my new intention is different. Instead of putting it in the drop box, I will walk right up and hand my journal to Beecher and if she says, “What’s this?” I’ll say, “I’m Eddie Corazon in case you forgot me and that’s my journal that I wrote when you were our teacher but I never gave it to you.” And then I’ll say, “I just
want you to know that even if you were only there for a couple of months, you were still the best teacher I ever had.” And then I will probably start feeling weird and I will feel like running right out of the library but I won’t run. I will stand right there and wait.

I
T’S WORKING.
I’
M CREATING MY NEW REALITY IN
T
RUTH OR
Consequences. Everybody calls me Eduardo and I sit with the brains and brownies at school. I wasn’t sure I would like being a intellectual as much as being a juvenile delinquent but then I had to think about it with an impeccable attitude. I asked myself straight up which was better and I had to admit it’s easier just letting your brain breathe like it wants to instead of always thinking about how you have to be so cool and look ruthless and walk dangerous and pretend you can’t hardly even read.

Tío Antonio moved since the last time we visited him. Instead of living in T or C, now he lives in a little brown house at the end of this little park down along the Rio
Grande that is part of Elephant Butte State Park. It’s way different from living in a town. Mostly it is just trees and cactuses and a lot of ducks. There are about ten little adobe
casitas
where people can camp and a walking trail that goes all along the river so you can stop and fish or have a picnic. There isn’t any school out there, so I ride the bus to T or C which has a brand-new high school that looks a lot better than most schools in New Mexico which usually have so much graffiti and broken stuff they look like Pancho Villa used to hide out there.

The first day, this one kid, Francisco, started dogging me. I wasn’t too surprised because when the teacher asked me what was my name and I was thinking whether to say “Eddie” or “Eduardo,” I saw him watching real close, like if I said the wrong thing I was history. But if you back down from your plans every time some loser dogs you, you’ll never get anyplace, so I stuck with my agenda and figured Francisco would either chill out or I’d have to deal with him later.

I was expecting some kind of trouble, because I figured being a intellectual wouldn’t be as easy as all the teachers think. So I had some backup plans just in case Plan A: Thinking Like a Intellectual didn’t work out. Plan B was Get Glasses because a lot of guys won’t hit you if you’re wearing glasses. Since I got twenty-twenty vision, I couldn’t get glasses from a doctor, so I tried on those cheap glasses for old people that they sell at Pic Quik. Those glasses made everything too blurry, and besides, they were real ugly and I’d
rather fight than look that stupid. So I decided to make some fake glasses like this one guy wore in the movie
Blue in the Face
that Beecher tried to show us once before she knew better.

Beecher said she was trying to introduce us to a different kind of movie with no car crashes in it, but then we got to the scene where the sexy jealous girlfriend comes into the smoke shop wearing a red suit and she takes off her jacket and she’s just wearing a lacy black bra and you could see the top of her black thong because her skirt was real low and tight. She grabs her boyfriend by the pants and says, “I’m going to ride you like a bull,” and all the guys started cheering and some of the girls screamed.

Somebody must of been passing by our room and snitched because a couple minutes later the principal came in and called Miss Beecher out into the hall. We didn’t get to watch the rest of the movie in class, but me and Jaime asked Primo to check it out from the video store and we watched the whole thing twice. It was pretty good for an old-people kind of movie with no excitement in it except sex. And there was this one guy working in a store who wore glasses that were real glasses with no glass. They looked like regular glasses unless you looked real close.

Just in case Plan B didn’t work, I made a second backup plan, Plan C: Keep an Alka-Seltzer in Your Pocket. Plan C turned out to be the one that worked.

After school, I went to the library on my way to the bus
loading zone and when I came out of the library, Francisco was leaning against the wall, smoking. He kept his cigarette all curled up inside his hand and he blew the smoke out real slow so that you couldn’t see it from very far away, so I figured he wasn’t as bad as he liked people to think he was or else he wouldn’t be so worried about getting busted.

When I saw Francisco standing there, waiting for me, at first I started thinking could I take him or should I throw the first punch or wait for him, but then I remembered to think like a intellectual, like Harvey Castro who never fights. And I thought, What would Harvey Castro do? and I thought Harvey Castro wouldn’t even think about fighting. He wouldn’t even let that intention into his head as Plan B. He’d just go right on walking around being intellectual and not getting into fights no matter what people said.

“Wassup?” I said to Francisco, and I didn’t even shift my books so I’d be in a good position to throw a punch. He didn’t say anything, but when I got close to him, he stepped out and bumped me hard with his shoulder. I just stopped and looked at him, but not with a fighting expression on my face. I was wearing my fake glasses, but I knew they weren’t going to be much help because you could tell Francisco was the kind of kid who would punch you in the glasses and break them right on your face.

“Where you from?” he said, and I said, “Rosablanca,” and he said, “What you doing over here?”

I thought about saying something smart, but Harvey
Castro would probably tell the truth, so I said, “Staying with
mi tío
Antonio until the end of the school year and trying to turn over a new leaf and stop getting in so much trouble so my girlfriend’s father will stop thinking I’m such a bad influence.”

Francisco’s face wrinkled up a little bit around his eyes and I thought he might smile, but he didn’t. He threw his cigarette on the ground and smashed it with his boot. He was wearing Ropers which isn’t a good sign in a fight because they hurt a lot worse than tennis shoes if you get kicked, especially you-know-where.

“Well, I have to go or I’ll miss my bus,” I said, and I tried to walk past, but Francisco stuck his arm out so I ran into it. I decided that if I lived long enough to get back to Rosablanca I would ask Harvey Castro where I could sign up for some kung fu. I dropped my books on the ground and stepped back to get a good take on Francisco before I remembered Plan C. Francisco wasn’t moving yet, so I decided to give it a try. I turned around partways so he couldn’t see my face and I took the Alka-Seltzer out of my pocket and slipped it into my mouth. The plan was for it to start foaming and then I would look like a lunatic and nobody would want to fight me. But it didn’t foam. It just sat on my tongue, sizzling a little bit, and tickling my whole mouth.

Francisco drew back and I ducked and when I did, that Alka-Seltzer jumped back into my throat and made me choke. It was stuck to my throat and I kept swallowing, trying
to get it to move, and then it started foaming. A little bit of foam came out of my mouth, but most of it went up my nose and it felt like it filled my whole head. It made my eyes water like I was crying and I reached up to wipe off the water and I stuck my fingers in through the holes where my glasses should of had glass.

Francisco just stood there looking at me and he had such a goofy expression on his face that I started laughing like a maniac. I laughed and laughed because it was really pretty funny except that it kind of hurt. But it didn’t hurt as much as getting your glasses broke right on your face or your
cojones
kicked up into your stomach.

I picked up my books and laughed all the way over to the bus, which was just about to leave. The bus driver said, “You all right, kid?” and I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” which was true except for having a fizzy head. Nobody sat near me on the bus to Tío’s house and nobody sat near me the next day, neither, on the way to school. I took another Alka-Seltzer with me, just in case, but I never had to use it. After that first day, Francisco acted like he never even saw me before which was fine by me.

P
RIMO WAS WRONG ABOUT INTELLECTUALS GETTING THEIR ASS
kicked all the time. Except for Francisco, nobody even tried to mess with me and I’m surrounded by girls because mostly the smart kids are all girls. None of them are as smart as Lupe, though. She writes me a letter every day and I write her one back and then we mail them on Friday so we can read one letter every day until we get the next envelope, but I always read them all at once. And I read them all over again every day, too. Lupe writes just as good as the people who write our books in school, so I always make sure I spell everything right and use my good grammar so she’ll know I’m not a
menso.
At first, I kept Lupe’s letters under my pillow but pretty soon there were so many it was making my neck hurt, so I stuck them under my mattress for sweet dreams.

I don’t have to stick Lupe’s letters under the mattress to hide them from Tío because he doesn’t even snoop in my room. He trusts me. Like he told me I couldn’t use the Internet to send any e-mails, just to surf the Internet for school projects or else read the news. I figured he would check up on me, but he hardly even uses his computer. I thought about sneaking one little e-mail to Lupe but I didn’t do it because Mr. G looks like the kind of father who would say he trusts you but he would still check up on you just in case and if he saw my e-mail then he would know I’m a sneaky liar and not the kind of man he can respect. Plus, I gave Tío my word of honor and I wouldn’t break it even if I didn’t care about Mr. G.

Every day, I have to come straight home from school and help Tío who is already home because he starts work at five o’clock in the morning. Tío doesn’t sit around after work and watch TV sports or hang out in the bar like a normal bachelor. He does projects. Hard projects that make you sweat, like building a cement block wall or hauling a bunch of eight-by-eights down to the river and digging up some dirt so we can put them along the trail to make a nice border. Tío doesn’t eat like a normal bachelor, neither. Instead of burritos and cheeseburgers and beers, he eats organic brown rice and vegetables and when he makes a barbecue, he fires up some salmon steaks instead of real steaks. He drinks iced tea that smells funny, a little bit like old socks, but it doesn’t taste too bad and it makes you feel calm and smooth inside because it’s herbalized and doesn’t have caffeine which is a artificial
stimulant. I thought I would get even skinnier eating this kind of food, but I’m getting thicker in some places. It must be all that work Tío makes me do and no sodas or chips to be found in this whole house because I checked.

Tío won’t let me watch regular TV, neither, just PBS or BBC. Not for a punishment, though. More like for principles. Tío has more principles than anybody I ever knew. He says TV rots your brain and the commercials make you think you need stuff you don’t need because you wouldn’t even know that stuff existed if you didn’t see it on TV, so how could you need it. Plus he says there’s enough violence in the world already without making up more for the TV addicts. I was pretty surprised but after only about two days, I stopped missing TV. I like it better to just walk down by the river and think. Sometimes I sit on one of the picnic tables under the trees and read a book or write a poem for Lupe or sometimes just sit and let my brain float down the river like a fat lazy duck. At first, the river was real low and sad-looking and the coyotes could walk right out in the middle and catch a fish, which I saw with my own eyes one day, but pretty soon the rains started up in the mountains and then they opened up the dam so the ranchers could irrigate and now the Rio Grande really looks like a river somebody would sing a song about.

One day I got up when Tío did just to see how it feels to be awake that early and then he left for work and I went outside because I never saw a sunrise before when I was sober.
Now I know what people are talking about when they say the light in New Mexico is different from anyplace else so all the artists like to move here. Even though I never been to another state, I could tell the light was special because the whole world turned kind of yellow with pink around the edges. Then I saw this bird that was bigger than any bird I ever saw, with a real long neck and a black ring around its eye. It flew right over my head and I could hear the wings flapping so loud it sounded like they were hydraulic. If you never saw a big bird in a real quiet place then you don’t know they make all that noise when they fly around, kind of like if you see one of those programs on PBS where the ballerinas are dancing, if you turn off the sound they look light and fluffy but if you turn up the sound they sound like an elephant stomping around. That bird was a blue heron. I looked it up in one of Tío’s books. He has about a thousand books, mostly about animals and places you can go camping and backpacking where you have to bring everything yourself including toilet paper and a little shovel to dig a toilet pit and you have to watch out for bears and mountain lions.

When I asked Tío wasn’t he afraid to go someplace where a mountain lion might chew off his leg, he said he would take his chances against a mountain lion any day instead of a punk with a gun in his hand and a head full of hate. Tío talks like that sometimes, like a poem. Beecher would probably like him. Lots of women like him. I can tell by the way they look at him when we go to a store or something, but he doesn’t
have a girlfriend and he never got married. For a while I was wondering was he gay and I decided even if he was it didn’t matter because he wasn’t a pervert who would do something bad to me, but then one morning I woke up and I saw this real fine lady tiptoeing outside to her car and Tío standing at the window drinking his stinky herbalized tea and watching her go.