Seeing Off the Johns (4 page)

“Alright, well, good luck in Austin,” Chon said.

“Yes sir. And good luck to you here in Greenton,” Robison said, not intending to be ironic.

Chon's eyes drifted past Araceli's in a deliberate show that took all of the will power he had. They met John Mejia's.

Standing there, face-to-face with his nemesis, Chon worked to convince himself that he and Mejia weren't too different from each other. Mejia wasn't better looking—at least not by leaps and bounds—than Chon. He had an athlete's build, sure, but a lean teenage baseball player's. All that separated them was a God-given and determinedly honed skill on the diamond—that and a future at a university in a city Chon couldn't even picture in his head outside of images of clock towers and capitol buildings he'd seen in books. And a present with the only person worth wanting in a one-stoplight town built on cattle and railroads and killed by bypasses and super-ranches.

“Good luck,” Chon said.

Mejia gave him a nod and took a drink of his beer. As Chon walked away, Mejia told Araceli something that made her laugh. A fire burned inside Chon that made him wish things he would come to regret in a few short days.

The clock read 12:13 when Henry got back to The Pachanga. Chon was sitting in the dark in front of the store, unable to lock up because he'd given his keys to his best friend.

“You're late,” he said when Henry got out of the car. He took the keys and caught a whiff of Henry. “And you're drunk. Where've you been?”

“Flojo's, man. Half the town is there, the other half is at church,” Henry said opening the passenger door to the Dodge-nasty. He let his body fall into the car, ass-first.

“You mean you were drinking at Flojo's?” he asked Henry when he got in the car.

“Yeah man, they were letting anyone in. The sheriff was even there getting pedo. We had all posted up at the Robison place, the whole town. Then Goyo Mejia got there to be with his parents. I mean, you think everyone was wrecked before… When he got
there, his mom came out to the porch to meet him and she, like, fell into his arms. That totally tore everyone up. He just stood there with her crying on him for so long he had to crouch down under her weight. His dad had to come out and help her up and into the house.”

They sat there in the parking lot of The Pachanga, the car not turned on, Henry's story fogging up the car's windows.

“After about an hour, Goyo came out and asked everyone to leave. He said that his parents and the Robisons were going through a rough time and had asked if we could leave them alone to ‘hurt over their sons.' He said it like that. He wasn't even crying, man. His face hadn't seen a tear all day.

“By that time the whole sidewalk in front of the house was covered in candles. Man, I can't even think of how so many candles got there so fast. That stretch of Viggie doesn't have a streetlight, you know? The whole street was lit with candles. The sidewalk was covered in front of their place, so they just kept putting them in front of other houses. They almost reach to your house. Anyway, everyone left. No one said where they were going, but half ended up at Flojo's and the other half at the church.”

Chon waited for Henry to tell him more. But Henry was done. He just sat there, his hands over his eyes, breath coming heavily out of his nostrils. Chon turned the car on and drove him home.

He took Mesquite from Henry's house, a street that, along with Sigrid, served as the east end of Greenton's east-west bookends. A few blocks from Viggie, Chon could see the town's church strangely active. Half of Greenton must have been there, looking up at the cross with their hands clasped in prayer (like a button that has to be held down on a walkie-talkie for any correspondence to be transmitted), asking God, asking the beaten-bloody Jew on the cross—asking them both at the same time—why?

He went back over to Main Street. There was a truck pulled onto the sidewalk—like its driver had tried to park perpendicular to it and then drove right on ahead. Chon might have assumed this was one of the Flojo's loaded congregants if he hadn't seen someone, presumably the truck's owner, standing on the roof of the cab. Chon slammed the brakes, backed into a two-point turn, and drove toward whoever was caving in the roof of his truck.

He put the Dodge-nasty in park, rolled down his window, and was about to shout the man down when he saw it was Goyo Mejia, indeed drunk, clinging to the telephone pole he was parked next to, tiptoeing up, just inches below the bottom right quadrant of the banner that had been hung for his little brother and his little brother's best friend.

“Hey,” was all Chon managed to say. The first half of the H was loud enough to be heard, but he let the
e
and the
y
die in a downward glissandoing diminuendo, like a trombonist running out of breath and letting his instrument's slide slip from his hand down to the ground.

Goyo was trying to stretch himself up the pole. Chon got out of his car to make his presence known, hoping that might make a difference. The danger of the situation had Chon standing on his toes, every muscle in his legs tense. When Goyo's balance would tip this way or that Chon would give a start in that direction, like he did at so many routine grounders in his Little League days, with about the same, if not less, efficacy.

Suddenly Goyo gave a shout of frustration and punched at the telephone pole, which had years of nails and staples in it announcing so many yard sales and church Jamaicas and lost pets. Then he gave another shout, this one out of pain. He fell to his knee, still on the truck's roof, and clutched at his bloody fist. Chon watched Goyo shift his focus from fist to banner, back to fist, then back again. Then he let go of his hand,
laid both hands palm-side down on the roof of the truck, righted his stance, touched down and gave a leap.

Chon watched in awe. It was far more graceful a leap than Chon could have ever executed, drunk or otherwise. Goyo seemed to float in air, ascending inch by inch toward the night sky. He caught onto the banner, but it was secured to the poles so well that when the right side came down, the left still held. That changed what would have been an up/down trajectory for Goyo to an outward pull like Tarzan swinging on a vine and bought him in a belly flop onto the bed of his truck. A less determined, less inebriated man would have let go of the banner. But Goyo Mejia, clinging to a relic of his brother's life that might otherwise have been taken by another person, held on with his bloody hand.

Half of the banner ended up in the bed of the truck with Goyo. The other half was splayed across Main Street. Chon heard a madman's laughter, replaced quickly by the loud sobs of a person who had either broken his ribs or lost his brother. Probably both. But Goyo couldn't have been hurt too badly because he began reeling what was left of the banner into the truck. Chon got in his car then and left, hoping that Goyo wouldn't remember that he'd had an audience, that someone had seen him at his whisky-soaked, grief-stricken worst.

The house was empty when Chon arrived. Just like Henry said, candles lit his way home. In the time it took Chon to drop his friend off and bear witness to Goyo Mejia's freefall, the candles had crossed his front yard and were making their way to Sigrid, if not all the way to Laredo and Mexico beyond. Chon got in the shower wondering if his parents and brother were among the half of town praying to a cross or the other half praying to the bottom of a glass.

He lay down in bed thinking, as he always did—but in a totally different way—of
Araceli. He tried to imagine how she was hurting. He thought of how he would feel if she died, but he knew that it wasn't the same thing. His obsession with her wasn't the same thing as what she shared with John. He tried to think how he would feel if he lost his parents or his brother, but knew, without really knowing, that this wasn't the same thing as losing someone you choose to love who chooses to love you back.

Then he gave up trying her hurt on for size. He knew she was hurting, and that was enough. He wished he could tear open her being and kiss her soul in ways sweeter and more loving than he had previously wished he could kiss her mouth or her breasts or her anything and her everything. He said a small prayer of his own for the Johns and their families.

He fell asleep that night having solved the riddle of nearly every sleepless night before then: he thought of Araceli without John Mejia muddying the picture. All he had to do, it turns out, was to think of her for her own sake—without thrusting upon her the weight of his desires and expectations—to see her as someone who could need and hurt and want and lose just like he could.

Two days later, the memorial service had to be moved from the Greenton Funeral Home to the school gym to accommodate the expected turnout. Coach Gallegos, the man the Johns had taken to regional tournaments in football and a state tournament in baseball, said a few words about the heart the Johns displayed on the field of play. Mrs. Salinas spoke about a Mejia most of them didn't know, about the poetry he wrote and how he helped tutor his best friend and had sworn to do so through a tough academic life. “They had been thinking about academics at UT!” she said emphatically.

Dan McReynolds, who did the weekly football season addendum to the ten o'clock news—“The Friday Night Blitz”—drove in from Corpus and was the keynote
speaker of sorts. He had been a fan of the Johns' style since he first ran highlights of them during their freshman year. It was through this show that the boys had become regional celebrities, especially when McReynolds began running tape of the boys' famous conferences at the line of scrimmage. He even began covering the Greyhounds baseball team during the spring, not just during the playoffs as was usually the case for AA teams from a town that made up so small a portion of KIII's viewership. It all paid off when he was in Austin to cover the state playoffs during the Johns' junior year. Greenton and AAAAA Corpus Christi Moody both lost in their respective semis. He did an exclusive interview with the boys that weekend and another when he came to Greenton to cover their signing with UT a few months prior to their deaths. During that interview, they made no show of lining up three different college caps and selecting one, as was the custom for such signings. In fact, they wore burnt orange for the occasion.

He talked about the young men he'd had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting. He'd become friends with them. He said that he had planned to cover them through college and the pros, sports or not, for the rest of his career. He gave a speech with as many sports analogies as he could fit in—he said the boys were running an option each with hands on the ball, each blocking for the other. He said that heaven was the end zone. He said that now they were in the stands cheering the rest of us on.

Chon listened and clapped along with everyone else. He had arrived early for the service, but already the gym was standing room only. He stood in back and, tall as he was, could not see the front rows of the service, where he assumed Araceli would be.

Throughout the service, the somber tone of the proceedings was disturbed by the sound of hyena-cackle laughing. People in the back of the gym where Chon was were exchanging confused looks and shaking their heads in disapproval. Single file lines
formed on either side of the gym, leading up to where the Robisons and Mejias sat. When Chon got close to the front, he could see that the strange high-pitched sound wasn't laughter, but Julie Mejia's wails of grief.

Chon was glad to see that there were not two closed caskets at the front of the gym when he got there. They had been left at the funeral home. There were only three very large pictures—one of each John's yearbook photos at either end of the stage and one of them when they had beaten Pleasanton to earn a trip to State their junior year. They each had an arm around the other. With their free hands they held up #1s.

Arn Robison and Andres Mejia were making an effort to shake the hand of every mourner who—out of respect or macabre curiosity—had taken a place in line to give their condolences. Angie Robison gave nods to people she knew and hugs to people she cared about and ignored the rest. Julie Mejia just cackled, clutching the arm of the son who was still with her. Goyo sat in a black suit and sunglasses, wiping his mother's tears and caressing her face with his swollen right hand. Patchwork sutures on his fist stuck out ever so slightly, like tiny shoelaces that needed to be tied.

Chon shook both fathers' hands, telling them he was so sorry. He had come from audience left, meaning he met Arn Robison first. When he got to Andres Mejia, he saw the Monsevais family sitting behind the Mejias. Henry was with his father, there to comfort his uncle and aunt who acted as though they'd lost one of their own because, really, they had. Conspicuously—and to Chon's great disappointment—Araceli wasn't there.

Sympathetic though he was to the families of the deceased, it was going to take more than a tragedy to quench his obsession. He still wanted to comfort Araceli, to make her feel better. He was removed from the initial shock of the Johns' death, from the reality of life's fragility and preciousness and whatever. His mind had wandered to more familiar selfish territory. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to make her feel
better. He wanted to save the day, to be her Band-Aid, her hero, to fill the roughly John-sized, boyfriend-sized void left in her heart.

He was tired from having closed the store the night before and having had to open up at five that morning because Rocha called in sick and Ana didn't answer her phone when Art called to ask her to cover. There was a bottleneck leaving the student lot. It was only 1:30 in the afternoon though. Chon would have time to go home, shower, and get to work on time. But he wouldn't get any sleep before going in to work.

He went to the funeral the next day with his family, even though he'd heard from Henry that Araceli wouldn't be there either. It was as well-attended as the memorial service. People stood in the wings, vestibule, and stairs leading to the church. The Gonzales family arrived an hour and a half early, affording them a small stretch of the pew in the farthest back corner of the church. They watched two caskets carried into church, an experience Chon hadn't expected to affect him as it did—he became lightheaded and would have fallen down if he weren't already sitting. They heard Father Tom's sermon and a Gospel reading, punctuated by Julie Mejia's crazy crying. Then the caskets were carried back out and loaded into hearses. The mourners got into their cars and followed the procession through town to the Greenton cemetery. Not Chon, though. He turned the Dodge-nasty left when all of the other cars turned right. He had come to church, having dressed in a shirt and tie for the second day in a row, and paid his respects to the Johns without any hope in the world of seeing Araceli. This gesture was enough to convince Chon, as he was sure it convinced his family and would convince Araceli if it came up, that his sympathy was sincere. He'd done his politicking and point proving. He didn't need to see a couple of mahogany boxes lowered into the ground.