Muchacho (7 page)

Primo stared out his window at the Black Range Mountains, which look green and blue in the daylight. “You know why I never told you why I shot that guy?” He waited a minute, but I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even shake my head. I just sat there wishing I wasn’t in the truck with him. I was wishing that I was in school listening to McElroy talk about Shakespeare or something, which would have surprised McElroy even more than it surprised me.

“You were too little, that’s why. I didn’t want you to know the bad things that some people will do. I’m still not going to tell you because maybe you’ll never find out which would be good. But you remember that girl who got pregnant and told everybody it was my baby but I said it wasn’t?”

“Yeah.” I did remember that girl. An Anglo girl named Debbie with long blond hair and skinny legs. She was a senior and Primo was only a sophomore. She stayed in school until she got so fat that they made her quit because they thought other kids would want to have babies if they hung around with her which is so stupid. Maybe girls think it’s cool to look at a fat pregnant belly, but guys don’t. If they put a pregnant girl in every class, I bet a lot of guys would start using condoms.

“It was my baby,” Primo said. “The prettiest little girl you
ever saw. But I was too young to be a dad. I was a
pendejo
, I admit that. But she was the one who seduced me.” He stopped talking for a second and looked out the window some more. “When she found a new boyfriend, I thought, Good, now I’m off the hook. No child support, no hassles from her. But that guy was
puro diablo.
He …”

He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes and put the glasses back on.

“I’m not going to tell you what he did to that little girl, but I promise if somebody did that to your kid, you’d shoot them. Anybody would.” He punched the dashboard and then rubbed his knuckles.

“How come you think the cops never came looking for me?” He looked at me hard.

“I don’t know.”

“Because they knew what he did, except nobody couldn’t prove it,” Primo said. “Even the cops don’t care if you kill some guy like him. That’s the kind of
basura
you don’t need the cops or the courts to decide anything about. Everybody knows the right thing to do. So I did it.”

I got a sick feeling when he said that because I remembered sitting in that car, smoking that cigarette, and then shitting my pants after Primo pulled the trigger. I picked up my iced tea and chugged the rest of the bottle.

“Hey.” Primo waited until I looked over at him and then he said, “I’m sorry you saw that. I’m sorry I didn’t wait. But everybody told me that guy was headed for the border and
when I saw him I knew it was my only chance. I had to do it. You understand that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I probably would of killed him, too, if it was me.”

“I didn’t kill him. Just blew his face off. When they took him to the emergency room, he thought he was dying, so he started confessing about everything he ever did. He didn’t wait until there was a priest. He confessed to whoever would listen … doctors, nurses, cops. After they fixed his face, they threw his ass in jail and locked him up.”

“For good?”

“Who knows,” Primo said. “He told everybody his friends on the outside would kill me, but nobody did. Somebody probably killed him in jail by now. Maybe not. Maybe someday I’ll walk out of some building and take a bullet in the back. Or I’ll drive past the wrong corner and find a drive-by waiting for me.”

He reached over and punched me on the arm. Not too hard. And he kept his hand there for a little while.

“You never know if today is your last day,” he said. “That’s why I say enjoy yourself. The sun is shining, the margaritas are icy, and the women are hot.”

I drank a margarita that day, and Primo drank three, and then we went to the dentist and got his tooth glued back on. The dentist smelled his breath and laughed and said Primo didn’t need any anesthetic.

On the way to the dentist, we saw this Indian-looking
lady with two little kids, and they were all dressed like those old-time posters of the
Indios
with long black braids and a white blouse with ruffles and a real puffy skirt with red and blue and yellow parts. The lady was real short, not even five feet tall, and she didn’t look at us, just opened the door of this big pink store where you can buy lunch and margaritas and all kinds of tourist junk. She held the door open and stood there and didn’t look up and didn’t hold out her hand or ask for money or anything. And her two little girls just stood there, too, looking at the ground. They looked exactly like the woman except smaller, like those dolls that Letty has where you open the big doll and there’s another one inside just like it and you open that one and there’s a littler one.

Those little girls looked so tired and old and sad and I thought they were probably hungry, so I started to hand the lady a five-dollar bill, but Primo grabbed my arm and stopped me. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a couple of quarters and tossed them to her. When we got inside, he said, “Didn’t you see those guys?”

I said, “What guys?” and he said, “Those guys hanging out across the street.”

I looked back out through the door and saw a bunch of guys with dusty jeans and boots and old crooked cowboy hats smoking cigarettes or drinking Tecates, leaning against the building or squatting by the curb, but nobody talking. They looked the same as guys everywhere who don’t have jobs or wives or girlfriends who make them come home and mow the lawn or fix the windows.

“If you give that
pobrecita
money, they’ll take it from her,” Primo said. He walked through the store past a bunch of silver jewelry and paper flowers and giant pots into another room, where the restaurant was. When the lady at the counter asked him did we need menus, he said, “Nachos y margaritas, por favor.”

When the waitress brought our bill, I asked her for some quarters. As soon as she walked away, Primo asked me did I need quarters to buy a condom in the bathroom in case we got lucky on the way out of town.

“Ha-ha,” I said. I knew he knew what I wanted the quarters for.

“You got any ones?” Primo asked me. I nodded and he flipped his wallet shut and shoved it into his front pocket, where he keeps it because he wears his jeans real tight and he says if somebody can get their hand into his front pocket without him knowing, that will be the day somebody loses their
cojones.
“Give me the bills.”

I handed him eight singles and he handed one back to me and told me to stick it in my front pocket. Then he took the rest and folded them into squares and put them into the palm of his hand and curled his fingers around them. “Can you see them?”

“No,” I said.

“Okay, here’s what you do. You look in that little basket of bracelets that lady has sitting on the sidewalk. You look through them all real careful, checking out the colors and how big they are. And you mix them up real good, and while
you’re mixing, you put those bills into the bottom of that basket. Then you pick out two or three bracelets and you stand up and pull that dollar out of your pocket and give it to her. Those guys will see the dollar and they’ll probably leave her alone because it’s not that much money. But if she’s smart, she’ll move on down the street with her basket and stick the rest of that money someplace secret.”

“Why can’t we give her a couple fives instead of all those ones?” I said.

“Hello.” Primo knocked me on the head like a door. “She has to spend the money, right? If she goes into a store and buys something with a five-dollar bill, then whoever is watching will see she has money. They’ll follow her and take whatever she has left. If she just has ones, she can spend them one at a time and hide the rest.”

I asked Primo did he figure out that plan from his own experience or did somebody teach him and he said, “What do you think, muchacho?”

I
CAN’T BELIEVE IT.
I
ACTUALLY WROTE SOME POEMS.
B
EECHER
tried to get me to write some last year after she caught me reading this one library book that had a bunch of poems by Gary Soto, but I wouldn’t do it just like I wouldn’t sign up for ballroom dance back then. But last week when Lupe said she thought poets were deep, I decided I better give it a try—especially since T.J. Ritchie wrote a poem that Mr. McElroy typed up and sent to a magazine because he said it was so good. I can’t have T.J. going around looking deeper than me, especially in front of Lupe.

When I told Lupe I was thinking about writing a poem, she clapped her hands and kissed me on the mouth, right in the hallway. Then I had to do it, except I couldn’t think of a
subject. So I looked it up in our literature book where there’s a chapter on poetry. In the writing assignment part it said anything could inspire a poem, it doesn’t have to be nature or love or death or big important things. You can just look around at the world and paint word pictures of what you see, like a red wheelbarrow. So I looked around McElroy’s room at the punks and stoners and assorted losers, and the bulletin boards and all the lame posters that are supposed to inspire you because they have a picture of an airplane crashing through a bunch of clouds and a quotation underneath the airplane that is supposed to make you want to be a successful person instead of a high school dropout. Then I wrote two poems, just like that. Here they are:

Okay. That was number one. I still haven’t decided whether I like it or not because it has such a weird ending. But I didn’t even make up that ending. It just came out of my pencil.

Number two I wrote because of this one girl with purple and green hair on one side of her head and no hair on the other side because she shaved it all off. She has about ten earrings in her ears and a little bone in her eyebrow and a diamond in her nose and something stuck in her tongue. She wears real short T-shirts so you can see the rings in her navel and she has weird bumps on her chest so she must have some in her nipples, too. When Letty got her ears pierced, she went around smiling all the time, checking herself out in the mirror and admiring her earrings. But that pierced girl never smiles. She’s the saddest person I ever saw, but she doesn’t go around crying or anything. Mostly she swears at everybody. I don’t have a good title for her poem, so right now I’m just calling it “Pierce Everything.”

I got some tears in my eyes after I wrote that one, but lucky for me nobody saw because the bell rang for lunch while I was writing and everybody except Lupe ran out of the room, including McElroy who always goes jogging during lunch in some baggy brown shorts. Lupe stayed at her desk, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was copying down the assignment from the whiteboard and she had her head bent down close to her notebook. It almost looked like she was praying and her hair fell down and hid her face like a shiny black satin curtain. And Lupe became my next poem.

After I wrote that, I felt like I had turned into a poem myself. I felt as light as a piece of paper, like I could float right up to the ceiling. I copied that poem over real neat and tore the page out of my notebook and folded it over and over, like
the little kids do, until it was a tiny little square. I wrote Lupe’s initials on it and put it in my pocket and carried it around with me until after school when I pretended to tickle Lupe and I stuck it inside her bra and held her hands so she couldn’t get it out. When I finally let go, she hit me in the head with her purse and called me a
pachuco
, but I didn’t even care. I just smiled, thinking of my poem sitting so close to Lupe’s heart.

A
FTER
L
UPE READ MY POEM, SHE CRIED.
T
HEN SHE TOLD ME
I should be a writer because if you can write something that makes people cry then you have the gift. I told Lupe maybe I had a little tiny gift. Maybe only she would cry from reading my poems and not other people, so she said, “Let’s show them to Mr. McElroy and see what he thinks,” and I said, “Not.”

“You shouldn’t be afraid,” Lupe said. “He’s not a very good teacher, but he’s a nice man. And he wouldn’t laugh at you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not afraid he would laugh at me,” I said, except that is exactly what I was thinking. “I just don’t want to show them to nobody but you.”

We were sitting on the bench outside the main office
eating lunch, where most kids don’t like to hang out because it’s too close to the principal. There are other places where it would be more private but I don’t trust myself to be in private places with Lupe at school. When we’re in the same class, sometimes I have to get myself kicked out because sometimes I can’t sit down when Lupe’s in the same room with me—if you know what I mean. I have to get out of the room just so I can breathe.

“Your poem is better than T.J. Ritchie’s poem that got sent to the magazine,” Lupe said. “He showed it to me. Yours is way better.”

I didn’t like T.J. showing his poem to my girlfriend, but at least she liked mine better than his. Unless she was just trying to give me self-esteem which she thinks is so important if you want to succeed in life. Beecher was always talking about self-esteem, too, and how you can program your brain to succeed because your brain doesn’t know when you’re lying. Like if you keep telling yourself, “I am an intelligent, successful person,” your brain will believe you even though your brain is sitting right there where it could see that you’re a stupid loser if it took a good look.