Muchacho (3 page)

That’s when I stopped reading newspapers and watching the TV news because those guys are supposed to be investigative reporters but even an idiot like T.J. Ritchie could have made a better investigation than they did. All they
would have had to do was go to my neighborhood and stand on the corner and watch. And they’d see that black pickup with the black-tinted windows sitting right behind the bus stop. They’d see the bus pull up and all the kids start piling out the door and when the last couple of kids got off the bus, the door of that pickup would open and a real big guy in a black sweat suit with a black watch cap would get out and start walking behind those last kids. And the kids would walk a little bit faster and the blood in their ears would pound like that sound track from
Jaws
when the shark is circling the boat, getting ready to chomp their arms and legs off. And they’d see this one kid who was walking alone, like I made the mistake of doing a couple weeks after Bobby got popped. Then they’d see that big guy in the sweat suit grab that all-alone kid and put a gun up to his head and say, “Here’s the package. Here’s the address. Here’s the money. Deliver it or you’re dead.” And the kid would deliver the package because he wasn’t stupid enough to Just Say No. And the next day, that kid would get the message that if he didn’t show up on the corner and do another delivery, the cops would be knocking on his door to bust him for dealing drugs and they wouldn’t believe him if he told them about the black pickup and the gun because he’s a poor Mexican kid from a bad neighborhood, so the cops figure he’s theirs sooner or later and it might as well be sooner. And the kid would know that black truck would be waiting by the bus stop the next day, and he couldn’t say no to drugs, so that kid and his cousins would make a gang and he would never have to walk alone again.

O
KAY, HERE’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND
H
ARVEY
Castro who lives next door to me except it’s like we live on different planets. Harvey’s friendly and everything but we don’t hang together because he’s a senior at the regular school and I’m only a junior at the alt school. Plus, Harvey is from Nicaragua which doesn’t really matter except all the Anglo teachers think he’s Mexican because he has black hair and speaks Spanish. Most Anglos are like that but it isn’t their fault because they don’t get a very good education about us. In elementary school they probably learn the Mexican hat dance and color in the geography maps for South America and Central America and memorize where the coffee beans come from, but by the time they get to high school they don’t
know the difference between El Salvador and Ecuador. They read about two pages in the history books and then they forget all about south of the border except for the tequila and the drugs and the mariachi dancers and the coffee. This one time, Beecher told us she bought this special fair-trade coffee that was picked by people in Ecuador who didn’t get ripped off by the big coffee companies. But I bet those people were still real poor because if they weren’t, why would they spend all day picking coffee beans for rich Americans who spend so much money on one cup of coffee that they could have bought five breakfast burritos instead?

Anyway, Harvey is from Nicaragua so when he came here they put him in ESL class because he had a real big accent and nobody could understand him for about a year and after that they realized he was some kind of genius so they switched him to Advanced Placement where he has been kicking Anglo ass ever since.

Harvey is short and round and everybody calls him Gordito but he has a mustache and a girlfriend who has been engaged to him for two whole years. I’m tall and skinny and I have about three hairs on my chin and the longest I ever had a girlfriend was for one week. I met Angela when I was working as a bagger at Kmart over at White Sands Mall and she worked at Chick-fil-A. I probably wouldn’t have even met her except we got off work at the same time and we both liked that bourbon chicken from the Chinese takeout. The first couple times I saw her, I didn’t say anything because she was
too pretty to talk to. But the third time I saw her, she brought her bourbon chicken over and sat down at the same little table where I was sitting and said, “Hi, I’m Angela,” and after that she was my girlfriend.

A couple days later, we were walking around the mall after work and Angela said she was cold, so I bought her a leather jacket. The next day, she said she didn’t want to miss my calls, so I bought her a cell phone. Then I didn’t see her at work for a couple days, so my cousin Graciela who is in the same class with Angela drove me over to Tularosa where Angela lives. When I knocked on the door, this big buff
güero
answered the door and told me to get lost and leave his girlfriend alone or he would mess me up good. I said what about all the stuff I bought her and he said, “That’s your loss, sucker.” He poked his finger in my chest, too, right in front of
mi prima.
I got so mad I drove like a maniac all the way home and I drove into a irrigation ditch and hit a little tree and broke it. Graciela had to go to the hospital but she was all right and she didn’t sue me or anything because she’s family and she felt sorry for me because it took me about six months to pay for that stupid tree. And now I have to walk or skateboard everyplace because Papi took my car away and gave me a bicycle which I wouldn’t ride if you paid me because then everybody would see that I’m a loser.

Harvey Castro rides a bike. He rides it every single day, even when it rains, but he never looks sweaty and his hair doesn’t move. He has this kind of long hair that he combs
straight back from his forehead and it never moves. I think it looks wack like those old TV game show guys but all the girls think Harvey is cute. That’s what they always say. “Ooh, Harvey is so cute.” And if the guys make fun of Harvey for being cute, he just laughs and says, “Do you want my autograph now while you can still afford it?”

No matter what anybody says to Harvey, he won’t fight. He’s too smart to fight. In fact, he was going to be the valedictorian of his class when he graduates. I don’t even know if I’m going to graduate or not. It depends. But Harvey already has a scholarship to go to the University of New Mexico. He got invited to go to a bunch of other colleges, even some rich ones like Harvard, but he says he doesn’t want to go too far away in case his parents need him for something.

Harvey should be the valedictorian because he has a 5.0 GPA on account of all his extra credits for taking college classes and being president of the student council and all kinds of community service stuff that he didn’t even have to do. The only time I ever did community service was when I got caught shoplifting. But last week, the principal at Rosablanca High called Harvey’s parents and told them that they should be so proud of their son for being number two. Now he’s the studitorian or some lame title like that. Even though everybody knows Harvey is
número uno
and he has the highest GPA, it doesn’t count because he was in ESL for a year and ESL credits don’t count the same as regular classes. So they took away being the valedictorian. Harvey’s mother
called up my mother and told her all about it and I thought,
Híjole! Watch out!
because now Harvey is going to let them have it—but the next day he just walked around the neighborhood like normal. He didn’t even act like he was pissed.

Henry Dominguez asked Harvey was he going to sue the school and Harvey just laughed and said, “It’s just high school. It doesn’t really matter.”

That’s the real difference between Harvey and me. Things don’t matter to him like they do to me. I would of burned down the school or at least tore a toilet off the wall in the bathroom. But that’s why I’m in the alt school and Harvey Castro isn’t even though I used to get straight A’s before I started being a juvenile delinquent. Harvey’s parents are poor just like mine, and he’s the oldest kid just like me, and he’s Catholic and his father kicks his ass just like Papi does mine, so how come Harvey’s so cool and I’m so hot? How come he just walks away from fights and does his homework and gets a college scholarship and I flunk biology and attract fights like mosquitoes on a summer night? Is it in my genes? Or did my parents do something wrong? Or am I just who I am by accident?

I used to think I was messed up because of being a sex offender in the second grade. I wasn’t really a sex offender but that’s what the school labeled me after I kicked my teacher in the crotch. I didn’t mean to kick her in the crotch, neither. I was just trying to get her to let go of my ear. She was this real mean little teacher who used to twist the boys’ ears all the
time, anytime we did even the littlest thing wrong, and sometimes when we didn’t even do nothing. She would just grab your ear and twist it until it felt like she was ripping it right off your head and we would all cry, even T.J. Ritchie, because it hurt real bad. And this one day, I had a ear infection and I even had a note from my mother saying I shouldn’t have to take gym class and that teacher knew I had a ear infection but she twisted my ear anyway. I yelled at her to stop but she wouldn’t. And I tried to hit her but my arms were too short. She just held her arm out straight and practically picked me up off the floor by my ear. So I kicked her. I wasn’t aiming at any special place. I just kicked and my foot went right between her legs.

It was a total accident. I didn’t even know where I kicked her. I was just glad she finally let go of my ear. But the next thing you know, they had the security guards and the police and the psychologist and the nurse and everybody all interrogating me and asking me questions. I can’t even remember what they asked me because my ear hurt so much that mostly I just nodded my head because I didn’t want to say anything because then I would start crying like a little baby in front of all those people.

They put me out of school for a week and when I came back all the kids acted like I was Rambo or something. T.J. Ritchie said I was a real badass and I thought that was so cool, so I pretended like I meant to kick that teacher. And I said I would kick her again if she came near me, so they put me in
another teacher’s room and I could tell right away that she was afraid of me and I thought, How cool is that, a teacher being afraid of you when you’re only seven years old. So every time she looked at me, I messed up my face and tried to look like a real mean badass.

After that, they started sending me to talk to this lady in a suit every Friday when we were supposed to have recess and she asked me to draw pictures and play with toys and make up stories about all kinds of weird things, like what would I do if I had a little baby and I was the father and would I punch that baby if it cried. I liked that lady because she had a nice soft voice and she never yelled or twisted my ears. At the end of second grade, I never saw that lady again but when I went to third grade, they put me in special ed. Not the special ed for dumb kids but the special ed for kids who don’t know how to act. I told them I already knew how to act but nobody listened to me, so I showed them I could act like those idiots. I drew pictures of
chichis
on my desk and threw gummy bears up so they stuck on the lights, and sneezed
mocos
all over the hair of the girl who sat in front of me—then they started making me take those pills. I took them for a couple of months but they made me feel spastic, so I started throwing them away until T.J. Ritchie told me I could sell them.

It really wasn’t such a big deal. I could have kept on telling those people what happened until somebody believed me. Or I could have just said I was sorry for kicking that teacher and started getting A’s again, but I was too stubborn
and so mad. Even way back then when I was little, I was mad about how they treat boys different. When girls do mean things, people always think they were abused or something. When a boy does something mean, even by accident, people usually think he’s a future felon, especially if the boy is Mexican.

Still, I could have brushed it all off just like Harvey Castro brushed off getting his valedictorian award stolen by the school. But I can’t brush off nothing. Not even little stuff. Everything just sticks to me. And all those little things just weigh me down so much that I feel like my bones are made of stone and if I walked into the Rio Grande I would sink to the bottom so fast that I wouldn’t even make a ripple and nobody would even notice I was gone.

T.J. R
ITCHIE IS A NO-BRAIN STONER, BUT YOU GOT TO GIVE
him props for having big
cojones.
T.J. just says what he thinks no matter what. Part of the reason is because he’s so big, I think, but the other part is because he really believes he has everything figured out. Like yesterday, when we were discussing current events in McElroy’s class, and this one black kid said what about that black guy who didn’t do nothing and didn’t even have a gun and he got killed by the cops right before he was supposed to get married and why does that shit keep happening, T.J. said, “Because
you
people let it happen, dipshit.”

Everybody started hollering different stuff at T.J. and the black kid looked around real fast, like he was looking for his
homies to back him up, except if you’re black in Rosablanca, you’re on your own. We only got like six black kids in the whole school. McElroy banged his ruler on his desk, which is the signal for everybody to stop talking, but T.J. kept right on going.

“I’m serious,” T.J. said. “The cops don’t do nothing about it and the government sure ain’t gonna do nothing about it, so the regular good black people need to do something about it. Whenever a cop kills a innocent black guy who wasn’t even strapped, then some other regular black people need to kill that cop. If the cop kills two black guys, they need to kill that cop and his partner so they’ll know how it feels to get killed just for being who you are. If they can’t get to the cop, they should kill his wife or one of his kids. And don’t just shoot them once, neither. They got to shoot them forty or fifty times, because that’s what the cops do to those guys. You know the guy is dead after the first or second shot, but they keep on shooting and shooting so the guy can’t get better and sue them. Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead—”