Seeing Off the Johns (2 page)

SUMMER
SUMMER

Concepcion ‘Chon' Gonzales didn't partake of Greenton's joy in those forty seconds. Instead he forced himself into eighty seconds of fake sleep interrupted by the sounds of sirens and the loud hootings of his neighbors and parents. Even his little brother Pito went out to cheer them on. The traitor. Chon pretended to sleep through the Johns' parade to prove some point—a point he couldn't quite define—to his family and to all of Greenton, but the town failed to notice his silent protest.

The night before, Pito made a big deal of asking their mother to wake him up early so that he could join in the morning festivities.

“Promise me, Mama,” he had begged, unnecessarily.

Chon's parents wanted Pito to witness what could result from hard work and skill, but they knew about Chon's sulky dislike of John Mejia so they didn't say much.

“Alright. Go to bed,” their mother said.

Pito clapped his hands excitedly and went to his room, avoiding his brother's eyes. In the silence that followed, the rock chords of a beer commercial blaring from the TV underscored Chon's anger at his brother and now at his parents. Chon sat at his end of the couch while his parents sat at the other, making a big deal of not mentioning the obvious—John Mejia's spectacular success.

Chon spared them any further awkwardness by getting up, grumbling something
about being tired after last night's partying, and went to his room where he pretended to be asleep.

Chon hadn't always cringed at the thought of the Johns, particularly at the thought of Mejia. His animosity was only four years old. It had existed for just under a quarter of his life and for the entirety of what he considered to be his manhood, from thirteen to that very day.

In elementary school, Chon had been the cutest and—that indicator of alpha male status—the tallest boy in his grade. Even then, it was clear to him that he could have for his girlfriend any girl he chose. Naturally, he chose the prettiest girl in school. From third grade through seventh, Chon Gonzales, the boy with the glowing hazelnut/amber brown eyes, had Araceli Monsevais at his side.

During this time, Chon played on Little League baseball and football teams alternately with and against the Johns. At many of these games, Araceli would sit in the stands and cheer Chon on. While she was there, more accurately, to cheer on her cousin Henry, who seemed always to be on any team Chon was on, Chon played every second in right field as though she were there for him and him only. He would make to run in the direction of any ball that was hit. In the event a ball was hit his way and he missed it, as he was likely to do, he would hustle to pick it up, try his damnedest to throw it where it needed to go, and pray that Araceli couldn't see from the stands the tears that were burning in his eyes.

One of the lasting memories of Chon's baseball days was the game when he had the good luck to smack a high curve—one the too-young pitcher he was facing shouldn't have been throwing—with the sweet spot of his TPX, launching the ball into left-center field. After a sprint fueled by the desperation of a boy prematurely aware of the fleeting nature of Little League glory in a small town—a boy who knew that he wasn't likely to ever hit a baseball that well again—and with the benefit of a throwing
error from a left fielder who had fought with his center fielder teammate for the ball, Chon had enough time for a stand-up triple. He slid—Pete Rose-style—anyway. It was a great experience while it lasted. It should have made a great memory, except that when he got up and dusted himself off, he realized that Araceli hadn't seen it. She had gone to get candy at the concession stand or to use the restroom or to do something that caused her to miss Chon's only hit of the day—and the only extra-base hit of his short career.

That was the story of their relationship: poor timing and an inability to recreate a moment of glory.

That night, on the eve of the Johns' departure from town, Chon lay awake thinking of possible ways in which he would win back the woman he felt destined to be his. Tomorrow Mejia would have the future and the rest of the world on the end of a string. With all of that good fortune coming to him, couldn't he leave something behind?

John Mejia haunted Chon's thoughts. But it was hard to extricate Greenton's Romeo from its Juliet, if even only mentally—Chon couldn't picture any version of Araceli without John Mejia at her side, at least any version he would want to focus on. The only John-less images he had of her were pre-John images.

The truth was, Chon could really remember hardly anything about his years with Araceli. How much attention did any boy pay to a girl before he is interested in sex? His interest in her was pure and fleeting, like so many other interests he picked up and put down when he was young. Sure they held hands, but only until their hands got sweaty. Sure they kissed, but what good is kissing when the kissers have no idea what it could lead to? They hadn't even started talking on the phone in earnest teenage obsession.

And that's all the Araceli that Chon could lay claim to: a pre-John one, an Araceli that Mejia seemed happy to concede to Chon, because he was never jealous.
Mejia never registered Chon as a threat to his relationship with the most beautiful of Greenton's daughters—not when he first took her from Chon, and not any time thereafter.

On the day he took her, a day at the beginning of seventh grade, Mejia made a big deal of waiting at Araceli's locker to walk her to class. That was something Chon had done every now and then with Araceli, the girl he called his girlfriend, but who hadn't called him her boyfriend in quite some time. While Araceli had achieved a firmness and amplitude of body in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, Chon, whose voice had not yet begun to break and squeak much less dip to the smooth baritone tenor of John Mejia's, hadn't seemed to notice. Once again, timing was off. Except that, this time, it was Araceli who hit for the fences and Chon who missed seeing it.

John Mejia didn't miss it though. Chon never stood a chance against so much facial hair and muscles and bass and testosterone and so much burgeoning local celebrity. The Johns were already beginning their athletic takeover of the hearts and minds of Greenton. Strained as his relationship had become with Araceli, Chon wouldn't have stood a chance against the opposition of any interested older boy. He didn't fault Araceli for having snubbed him for one of Greenton's two crowned princes. He simply figured, naively, that when his maturity and biology caught up to hers and to Mejia's, he would win her back.

Time didn't treat him so well though. He was plagued with such a case of acne that not even Christ would have touched him. He shot up in height from five nine to six four but couldn't seem to gain an ounce of weight. Come eighth grade, he was a freak of nature and Araceli was dating the freshman starting quarterback and third baseman of Greenton's most important varsity squads.

Chon lay in bed the morning of the Johns' departure without a clue. How would
he get Araceli back? His complexion was finally clearing. He'd managed to put on eight pounds during his junior year of high school. He no longer only saw ugly when he looked in the mirror. After some late night misadventures with Ana at work, he knew that he was walking around with hot blood in his veins and some experience to complement the desire that emanated from between his legs, controlling his every thought sometimes. But still Chon could only think of Araceli's beauty in the context of her prom picture with Mejia.

So he slept uneasily, waking up from his light sleep when he heard Pito ask, “Did I miss it?” Their mother assured him that he hadn't and shushed him up.

Chon could have just rested there quietly, staring at the ceiling or at the TV on mute or reading a magazine. Instead he forced his eyes shut and crammed his head between his pillows. Sleeping through the town's final celebration of the Johns would harden Chon's resolve to continue loathing a guy who never really did him wrong.

The first rush of applause, when the Robison family drove by his house en route to the Mejia's, didn't make Chon open his eyes. And he had fallen asleep for real by the time the sound of sirens and shouts passed by him some time later, waking him for the second it took him to realize what was going on. He closed his eyes in a calm and sinister fashion, like he imagined a super villain would. Because isn't that what he was—Bizzaro trying to take Lois Lane from Superman?

When the day was over, he could tell himself he had slept through seeing off the Johns. He would emerge from his bomb shelter, guns in both hands, ready to fight the Nazis or the Russians or the Iraqis. He would right the wrong that had never really been done to him in the first place.

For good measure, and to put some distance between himself and his own stand—because what kind of stand would it have been if he'd backed down straightaway after not having made his point—Chon didn't leave his room or get out of bed until three pm, thirty minutes before he had to go into work. He slammed the door to his room behind him and took the quickest of showers, brushed his teeth, slapped on some deodorant, combed his hair, then hopped in his car, an '89 Dodge Dynasty that had been dubbed the Dodge-nasty by Chon's best friend in town and, thus, the known world, Henry Monsevais. Henry was also Chon's old Little League teammate and perennial bottom-of-the-order brother. And he was Araceli's cousin, younger by two weeks. Henry had taken the liberty of severing the cursive connection between the y and the n and scraping off the first two letters of the logo on the trunk of Chon's car. When Chon saw what Henry had done, he laughed and said, “It fits.”

When, for the remainder of his sophomore year, everyone in school had taken to calling Chon “Dodge-nasty,” he was less than pleased.

“I'm sorry, man. If I had known—” Henry apologized when John Robison said, “Later, Dodge-nasty” out the window of his Explorer as he cruised by. Chon cut Henry off.

“Don't worry about it,” he said. He was at the pinnacle of teenage self-loathing. “It fits.”

Everything looked normal on the way to work. There weren't any more or less cars on the road. The driver of every car loosened his grip on his steering wheel to pick up the index finger and pinky of his two o'clock hand in the form of a wave. There were more kids in the yards he drove by—playing football or hide and seek or whatever kids play—but today was the first Saturday of the summer, so that was to be expected.

When he pulled onto Main, he saw the “Hook 'em, Johns” banner bobbing up and down, lazing in its perch over town. It was almost enough to make Chon cringe except
that the Longhorn symbols on either side of the banner reminded him that the Johns were moving away, on to bigger and better. They would meet new friends, new girls—women even—in Austin. Greenton, Texas and Araceli Monsevais and that microcosm of relevance—that blip that didn't even register on Mejia's radar—Chon ‘Dodge-nasty' Gonzales were to be forgotten. They would be written off as a part of the quaint past.

“Good luck,” Chon said, flipping off the banner, “and good riddance.”

Chon parked the Dodge-nasty on the car-length path behind The Pachanga convenience store and gas station, worn bare to dirt by years of employee parking. Artie Alba, the store's owner who lived in San Antonio but kept close watch on his store through reports he would receive from his in-town cousins, had purchased the Greenton Filling Station and renamed it. He knocked out a portion of the wall behind the register to install a drive-through window for the convenience of drunks too lazy to get out of their cars to buy beer.

Someone had spilled soda on the floor in front of the fountain area. Judging by the stickiness of the syrup that remained, the soda had been spilled three hours before. The beer cooler was near empty which didn't make sense since beer sales were only permitted after noon, and the store's solitary unisex bathroom was a mess, bombshat diarrhea all over the bowl. This is what Chon could look forward to for half of the summer's work days, because now that he didn't have school as an impediment or an excuse, he would be splitting the mid-shift with Ana, which meant coming in after Rocha, the septuagenarian drunk with his Olmec complexion and his malformed hook of a baby-sized left hand and his refusal to do any of the work that he was otherwise able to do when The Pachanga was still the Greenton Filling Station and Art Alba still lived in town.

“It's my hand, bro,” he used to say, when asked about the state of the store at the end of the 7 to 3:30 shift he worked exclusively. “Mi manito nanito.”

Now all he would say if so confronted was, “Fuck you, kid. Do it yourself.”

And so Chon would have to do just that: face lakes of high fructose corn stickiness, mountains of unstocked beverages in the tundra of the walk-in, and the aftermaths of shit-bomb tsunamis.

He walked to the back and put the mop bucket in the sink to fill before he even clocked in. He met Rocha at the wall-mounted time card tower. “How was it today?”

Rocha grumbled from the bottom of his throat, not bothering his tongue to syllablize nonsense.

“Well, the store looks really great.”

“Chinga tu madre.”

“¡Ay papí! I love it when you talk dirty to me!”

“Pinché maricón desgraciado.”

His spirits lifted as they were, Chon mopped up the fountain area with a smile on his face. His day wouldn't turn shitty until he hit the bathroom.

After a few hours of cleaning and relaying between the cooler, the drive-up window (at the sound of the doorbell buzzer on the bottom window sill), and the counter (at the sound of the bells above the door) like Pavlov's dog, The Pachanga was clean, stocked, and operating as slowly as it did on any other day.

Chon had been sitting on the stool behind the register for as long as it took his mind to wander to thoughts of Araceli—which is to say it hadn't been long—when he was distracted by the honking of a car passing by. It took him away from his favorite image of Araceli, remembered from the previous year's luau-themed homecoming dance. She wore a bikini top—white with pastel polka dots of varied size, like stars approaching a
spaceship Chon often fantasized he was piloting—with a simple flowerprint cloth tied at her waist and a pink lily in her hair. The Mejia goon in his blue board shorts, leather chanclas, and muscle-hugging designer tank top, though, was a part of that picture, a part Chon could only ever just blur out of focus, but never fully airbrush away.