Muchacho (2 page)

I heard it all because me and Jaime Sanchez were outside the main entrance trying to jack the change out of the pay phone. I seen Beecher going into Mrs. Nichols’s office and then the bell rang and we went to class and everybody was psyched because we didn’t have a teacher. Then this counselor showed up and took roll and started talking about how much more money we’d make in our life if we graduated from high school instead of dropping out. I wondered what that counselor would say if I told him that T.J. Ritchie already makes a lot more money than he does and T.J. don’t pay no taxes on it, neither.

Beecher showed up about ten minutes before the bell rang, but she didn’t say anything, just collected all her stuff. Her eyes were all red from crying. The counselor smiled real cheesy at Beecher and ducked out and we just sat there so quiet I could hear the clock above the door that only has a minute hand and stutters just like Jerome Harding. T-tick t-tick t-tick. The ticking made me think about when Beecher said the most important thing she could teach us was to choose how to spend our time because your time is your life.

After Beecher had gathered up her stuff and walked over to the door, she turned around and opened her mouth part-ways like she was going to say something. I thought maybe she was going to say it was no big deal and she would see us in the morning, but she didn’t. She just hooked her hair
behind her ears with her fingers and looked at us all, one kid at a time. I thought she might skip over T.J. Ritchie, but she didn’t. She looked at him exactly as long as she looked at me and her face didn’t change. I thought she would of changed her face a little bit when she looked at me.

Nobody said anything, not even the kiss-ass girls. I almost said something. I almost said,
“Hasta luego,
” but I didn’t because one little thing like that is enough to make a teacher think you care whether they live or die. If they think you give one little shit about them, they start working on you, trying to wear you down. Tell me your story, they say, I want to help you but I can’t help you if you don’t let me. Just tell me the truth. They think they want to know the truth. They think they can handle it. But they can’t even handle the easy shit like how come Joey Dinwiddie’s brother got straight A’s and a full ride to some college out in Oklahoma where they promised him he’d be the starting quarterback but he sat on the bench for two years with the only other black kid on the team and watched dumb white farmers fumble every play until he got disgusted and came home. He didn’t waste his education or anything. He got a job coaching at the regular high school, but if a really smart kid like Dinwiddie couldn’t make it, then what kind of chance is there for us regular everyday losers. None of the teachers ever has a good answer to the Dinwiddie question because there isn’t one. That’s just the way it is. Beecher might of thought of something, but by the time she showed up, Joey was tired of telling that story and the rest of us were tired of hearing it.

Every once in a while, when a teacher is too dense to get the message that they’re not really here to teach, they’re just here to fill in the roll sheets so the alt school won’t lose its funding and the regular school won’t have to deal with us, Denny Clodfelter pretends like he’s real interested in reading the stupid stories in our literature book. He even volunteers to read out loud, which just about makes the English teacher pee her pants. Then, after the teacher gets all excited about finding a punk who appreciates literature, Denny will stop reading one day right in the middle of some story and he’ll say, “You know, after your dad breaks a two-by-four across your face and you have to go around for the rest of your life looking like a flat-faced heifer, you just can’t care about reading these stories. Like you can’t get excited about some idiot who sells his fancy watch to buy some hair combs for his wife except she sold her hair to buy him a chain for his watch. Besides, that whole story is just bogus because who would want to buy some old used hair anyway.”

I bet somebody would buy Beecher’s hair, though, even if it was used because it’s so shiny like it has a million candles lit inside it. When she was standing in the doorway, trying to feel some kind of goodbye from us, I thought about giving her my journal that I never turned in after she asked us to write one important thing from our life. I wrote like six pages about how it feels to be a eight-year-old kid who idolizes his older cousin so much and how exciting it was when he finally let me ride with him one night and what a thrill it was to drink a cold
cerveza
and smoke a Marlboro with my arm leaning out
the window of that car with the killer speakers and chrome spinners. And how it felt to watch my cousin get out of the car and leave the engine running and walk up and knock on this kid’s door and then blow the kid’s face off the second he opened the door and how I shit my pants and sat in it all the way home, smelling the stink of hopelessness that hung around my life.

I didn’t give Beecher my journal, though. I figured she already had enough stuff to make her feel bad. Now she’ll probably go teach some Indian kids on a reservation in Arizona like she used to talk about sometimes. It’ll probably be easier out there. I don’t think they have so much gangs and stuff because they got tribes and drums and sweat lodges. We learned about all that during Native American Heritage Week. Beecher brought in all these Indian stories but she knew we never read our homework so she read us this one story out loud. It was written by this guy named Alexie who is a real Indian, and it was a pretty long story but it wasn’t even boring. It was pretty sad, though, and I know Beecher read it to us because then we would see that our life isn’t so bad because at least we got indoor plumbing and floors instead of just dirt and the government doesn’t try to take away our language anymore.

Maybe those Indian kids will appreciate Beecher. Maybe they’ll like having a teacher that calls up their parents and comes to their house to shake their hands and sit on their falling-apart furniture to show how much she cares. Maybe
those kids won’t break the windows in her car while she’s inside their house. They might even like her after a while. But we don’t like that kind of teacher here. We don’t need people feeling sorry for us. We need those hard teachers, the ones who know what it feels like to wake up hungry every day for sixteen years. The ones who catch you all by yourself in the hallway and grab your shirt and slam you up against the wall and say, “You’re such a fucking loser,” and then just drop their hands and shake their heads and walk away. Those kinds of teachers might be able to handle the truth if I ever felt like telling them, but I doubt if I ever will. What difference would it make if I did?

T
ODAY IN SCHOOL THIS NEW KID FROM
O
HIO SAID PEOPLE IN
New Mexico are lazy because everybody on his street parks their car right up in their yard near the front door where you would have some nice grass if you lived in one of those green places.

“I don’t see why they can’t even walk a couple steps to their door,” the stupid Ohio kid said, and I was going to explain that his neighbors might be lazy but probably that isn’t why they park in their yard because if they don’t got a handicap ramp and they park right in front of their door then they could be a dealer or some kind of gangster who doesn’t want to get shot trying to get from his house to his car or vice versa. But I didn’t tell him because Henry Dominguez already told
him to shut up and go back where he came from if he didn’t like it here. The Ohio kid’s ears got all red and I felt kind of sorry for him because I don’t know how many times somebody told me to go back where I came from except I am where I came from and they’re too stupid to know it—even though everybody has to take American history and it’s right there in the book that a whole bunch of states used to be Mexico, like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. Like
mi abuelo
always says, “We didn’t cross the border,
mijo.
The border crossed us. The Corazons been living here for three hundred years.”

When Beecher was here, we used to have some pretty good class discussions about stuff because Beecher was like one of those little sheepdogs that you see on the Discovery Channel where they don’t make any noise, but they keep all the sheeps going in the right direction and if one of the sheeps starts getting any big ideas and gets out of line, the little dog just bites it on the butt. But our new
pinche
dickhead teacher Mr. McElroy believes in democracy and it doesn’t work any better in our English class than it does in our government because only the real big guys get free speech and everybody else knows if they say what they really think who’s going to be waiting to whack them after class. McElroy tried to start a discussion about the border controversy after Henry told the Ohio kid to go back where he came from and the Ohio kid told Henry to go back where he came from, but as soon as McElroy asked for comments, T.J. Ritchie laid back in his chair and said why don’t we let those Minutemen who
bring all their guns and sit on the border in their lawn chairs just get up off their asses and do what everybody knows they want to do.

“If we just let those Border Patrol wannabes shoot the stupid Mexicans, then we wouldn’t have a border problem,” T.J. said. He doesn’t give a shit about the border, but he likes to get things started.

“That would be murder, you stupid ass,” said Teeny White, whose mother is Mexican.

“Those Minutemen guys are the ones who are stupid,” T.J. said. “I mean, I’m white and everything—”

“You sure about that?” Henry Dominguez hollered, and the tortilla crowd cheered. But T.J. Ritchie doesn’t care if you say shit about him being white because he’s always saying there are two kinds of white people and he thinks he’s one of the good kind because his mother drags him to church all the time and he knows a whole bunch of quotations from the Bible. They’re mostly quotations about why it’s okay to hate other people like gays or Arabs, but if anybody reminds T.J. that Jesus didn’t hate people, he just says, “Oh yeah? I’ll pray for you to stop being so stupid next time I go to church.”

“Those Minutemen are mostly those big fat dumb white boys who like to drive around the desert chasing down antelope and shooting them from inside their pickups,” T.J. said. “They call that hunting. Effing assholes.”

Then a bunch of other white boys who cut school every year during hunting season said maybe they should have open
season on idiots like T.J., and McElroy blew his whistle and gave us a spelling quiz. I kind of wished McElroy knew how to have a discussion because I had an idea when everybody was yelling. I was thinking what would happen if Canada decided they wanted to have more land, just like America did back when they invaded Mexico. I looked it up on the Internet. In our history book, it says “the Mexican-American War,” but in the Mexico history books it says “the United States Invasion of Mexico.” Anyway, so the Canadians just decide to take Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of those other cold states up there where all the lakes are. And they have to kick some butt and kill a bunch of people, but they win and then they put up this big fence and say, “Now this is Canada and you can’t come here and live unless we say so.” And some people would say, “But our family has lived here for three generations.” Or they would say, “My grandmother lives over there and I always visit her on weekends.” But Canada would say, “Tough shit. Handle it. And you can’t come here and work anymore, either, unless we say so. Even if you already worked here for years.” And Americans would say, “How come you’re acting so shitty instead of trying to get along with your neighbors?” But Canada wouldn’t have to answer that question because they already got what they wanted. And Americans would just keep on sneaking over the border because they would feel like nobody has the right to split up families or just take somebody’s land and say it’s another country and then Canada would get real pissed and say,
“Okay, we’re making French the official language. How do you like them
manzanas
?” But probably if you tried to ask some Americans to think about my Canadian idea they would just look at you weird and tell you to go back where you came from.

Anyway, all I’m saying is you should drive around the neighborhood at night and see if there are any cars parked in the yard right up by the front door before you buy a house in New Mexico, but if some new family is too stupid to figure that out then they’ll just end up freaking out and moving anyway, so it works out the same in the end.

P
EOPLE SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO GO AROUND TELLING LITTLE
kids to Just Say No to drugs because that could be dangerous. Besides, Just Say No has to be one of the lamest ideas ever invented in the first place and I bet it was invented by somebody white who never had to sleep in the same bed with four other people who hardly don’t ever take a shower because there wasn’t anyplace else to sleep. If just saying no worked then people would go around just saying no to stuff they didn’t want to do anymore. Papi could just say no to being poor and unemployed. People would just say no to cigarettes and they wouldn’t have to pay all that money to get hypnotized into quitting smoking. And all those white girls wouldn’t be puking up French fries in the bathroom behind
the cafeteria. And Bobby Chavez wouldn’t be dead. Bobby said no. Except he said no to the wrong guys and they popped him just like that. And then they put it in the paper that it was a drug deal gone bad, all insinuating that Bobby was buying drugs, which was the first thing that came to most people’s mind anyway because he was poor and brown.

It didn’t matter that Bobby was president of the Spanish Club and the best player on the soccer team and made the honor roll every single time. They forgot all that stuff as soon as the newspapers said there were drugs involved when the incident went down. The teachers all made little speeches about how much everybody would miss Bobby, but you could see it in their eyes that they believed all those lies in the paper and what they really wanted to say was, “See what happens to you when you waste your potential and take drugs?” And even though a bunch of kids tried to tell them that Bobby wasn’t buying, nobody paid any attention to them. The police and the newspapers and the television reporters all commentated and speculated that Bobby got caught buying a little recreational cocaine and
tsk tsk tsk
what a shame because he had so much potential. Even that Latina reporter from the TV station down in El Paso sat there in her sharp suit with her hair that doesn’t move and pretended like she knew what she was talking about.