Seeing Off the Johns (5 page)

John Robison's Explorer blew a tire and rolled over when he took a curve too fast just outside of Beeville, TX. Why the boys ended up there was anyone's guess. The quickest route to Austin from Greenton was to take 16 to San Antonio and 35 from there to Austin. It would have been a four-hour drive. As it was, they had either veered from that route after Benavides, going east to Highway 77 outside of Kingsville and taking that north. Or driven over to Corpus and taken the Harbor Bridge into Portland and up north. Whichever was the case, the Johns ended up on Highway 181. They filled the Explorer up in Papalote, which made the rollover crash they would get in some seventeen miles up the road that much more volatile. It was the cause of the Johns' caskets being closed. Lawyers were already, just three days later, making their way to Greenton from Florida and from all over Texas too, where class-action lawsuits were being organized against Ford and Firestone. Ambulance chasers hoped they could talk either the Robisons or the Mejias into foregoing the potential years-long wait of such a suit and make quick money in a settlement.

Representatives from both Ford and Firestone were at the funeral, where it was assumed they were sympathetic mourners from somewhere in South Texas. When a Firestone business card was revealed, a sheriffs's deputy unholstered his truncheon and an old man grabbed the hunting rifle that had been stowed in his truck. Neither
said anything. They just held their weapons across their chests. The Firestone suits never even got to speak with the parents of either boy before they got in their cars and drove away, followed quickly by the Ford representatives who saw just how their presence would have been received had they had the chance to say who they were.

When Chon got to work, Ana was outside sitting on the ice machine, an old double-doored cooler, smoking a cigarette and hugging herself. The cooler was five feet tall, taller than Ana herself. She would hoist herself up onto it by way of a milk carton and a trashcan. The impression Ana's ass left on the top of the cooler would deceive anyone looking at it—granted that they knew what it was—into thinking it belonged to someone sexy. It didn't. Four foot, ten-inch tall Ana had a round, flat rump that was just like her breasts—big, maybe even at one time desirable. But time and gravity had caused them to wrinkle and grow flabby. Her legs, by comparison, were small, made so by a drunk driver who hit her when she was eleven. The accident left her looking like a dreidel, the block of her upper body carried around on the legs of a preteen girl.

“She's whoring herself now,” Ana said, smoke coming out of her mouth with every word. “I mean, it makes sense. She has to do something to live.” She shook her head, looked across the street at San Antonio in her mind, and emptied the rest of the smoke from her lungs.

“I mean, fuck. You know? Worst mistake of my life.” She chain-lit a new cigarette, then stubbed out the old one on the cooler.

“Yeah,” Chon said. She had sent her daughter Tina away to live with the girl's father in San Antonio because Tina had been caught smoking pot in the school parking lot
with Charlie Marquez, who folks in Greenton called el camerón. The nickname, ‘the shrimp,' was a derivation of the word jailbait, given to the man by his friends when he was in his twenties—when he still had friends who would claim him—because of his tendency to go after younger girls. Twenty turned to thirty and el camerón lost friends because he was rumored to still be chasing underage tail. Then he turned forty-three and got caught getting a blowjob from a fifteen-year-old (Tina) in the high school parking lot. Charlie was run out of town when the charges didn't stick because the kid who caught him, a hall monitor narc with a clipboard—who was sent out to the parking lot to find truants with cigarettes and vodka in Sprite bottles—was naturally traumatized by the sight of the black and white belly hair that led down to his junk. She couldn't say for sure that she saw Charlie's joint in Tina Guerra's mouth, but nonetheless Charlie was run out and Tina was sent to her father.

In the year since Tina left for San Antonio, she had been kicked out of regular school and sent to a juvenile disciplinary school, where she made contacts with would-be dealers and pimps, developed a pretty bad addiction to drugs—pills and coke when they were available, but crack and meth mostly—done a short stint in rehab, and attended outpatient counseling which was working until her father lost his job and insurance. Bexar county's LCDCs were less like counselors and more like probation officers looking to send an offender back into the system where they belonged. Most recently, she had run away and been involved in a string of home invasions with a guy named Terry who was wanted on three drug charges and a failure to appear. Over the past year, Ana had filled Chon in on the news of her daughter's troubles as they were reported to her from San Antonio. Each time, she ended her report, in reference to sending Tina to her father, by saying, “Worst mistake of my life.”

Each time, Chon agreed with that statement—but in reference to something else.

A while back, Chon had talked a cigarette distributor into giving him a pack of his most expensive cigarettes. He thought he'd give them to Ana who always only smoked the cheapest cigarettes—Best Value, Skydancer, Leggett's—and would only splurge the extra buck or so on Camels every third or fourth payday. When Ana came in to pick up her paycheck, he handed her the green box of Nat Shermans. She stared at them for a minute. Then she said she didn't smoke menthols. She immediately shook her head, crossing herself.

“I mean, that was really nice of you,” she said. “You didn't have to get these for me.” Chon was confused—weird how moved she was by a pack of cigarettes he'd gotten for free. “I mean, not cause they're menthols. I just…Fuck—” She went to the back of the store, leaving the smokes on the counter. Chon was closing, the lights were off and the shop was locked up. Ana came to the front of the store, grabbed Chon, and began kissing him all over. He pulled back to look at her and ask what she was doing. When he did, he saw something in her eyes that had not been there before in all of the sexual encounters they had at her empty, cigarette-stinking house—he had stopped counting how many when it became something less than thrilling and more like embarrassing. What Chon saw in Ana's eyes was something like gratitude or an actual desire to be doing what she was doing with the person in front of her. She looked at him, kissed him on the head, then opened his pants and put him in her mouth.

Reeling from pleasure, Chon fell back onto the stool behind him. He looked out at Main Street through the store's windows, foolishly afraid that anyone would see what was going on. Ana relented for a bit, looking up at Chon with those new eyes, and scared him more than the thought of being caught with his pants down. Stroking him, she smiled and with a knowing shake of her head said, “You're so fucking wonderful, do you know that? If you were twenty years older, we'd never do this. You're too good for me. I'll never deserve someone like you, but thanks for being here now.”

She went back to her business of thanking Chon. He looked down at this woman—forty-three years old, widowed once, with a delinquent daughter and two ex-husbands—working him vigorously, expertly, he thought, in her mouth. He was aware for the first time that she was more than someone with whom he was complicit in the act of using and being used. She liked him. The responsibility of that realization nauseated Chon. Because, while he was currently placed precariously between her teeth, he was not the only one in this arrangement who was made vulnerable in the frame of the floor to ceiling windows at The Pachanga's storefront

She had offered him a cigarette that night. He accepted it to avoid any conversation in the darkness outside of The Pachanga—Ana smiling in the moonlight like a gargoyle atop the ice machine, Chon still feeling aftershock tremors of pleasure running through his belly. When she lit a second and offered Chon another, he declined and drove home. Fancy as it was supposed to be, the cigarette tasted off to Chon.

“So Bill called you and let you know?” Chon asked. To Chon's mind, Bill Guerra wasn't such a bad guy—just a parent, like Ana, who couldn't deal with his lost-cause daughter. He wouldn't tell Ana that though.

“Fuck that asshole. He isn't telling me anything. The detective in her case has been calling me. They might bring him up on charges for letting her get into all this shit. It'd serve him right.” Ana looked at her cigarette, which she'd lit crookedly. She licked her index finger and ran it up the side of her smoke to quell its diagonally advancing cherry.

“And you? Any news on your chula?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Chon said, “her parents sent her to stay with some family friends over in Corpus. They didn't want her to be around all this craziness. They're going to keep her over there until school starts.”

“Well, that sucks for you, Chon-chon. You wait for an opportunity like this to come along and your girl leaves the county.” She laughed smoke through her nose.

“Ana, those guys died,” Chon said, shaking his head.

“And? Death is a perfect opportunity for new love. That's how Bill got me—when Jo-Jo had his embolism. Believe me, in this life you get left so much that it doesn't matter how—if they die or leave you for someone else or even go gay or something like that. All that matters is if you get found by someone else. You know?”

So much of this struck Chon as wrong. But he didn't want to argue with Ana however much he hoped it wasn't true. He had lately realized that he could—if he chose to—change any of her beliefs or ideas by simply disagreeing with them. For that reason, he stopped disagreeing with her completely. He knew Ana was lost right now, had been for as long as he had known her. He resisted, as strongly as he could, her attempts at finding herself in him. They hadn't had sex in weeks.

“Anyway,” Ana said in the wake of Chon's silence. She slipped off of the ice machine onto the trashcan and stepped down onto the milk crate. “Her parents are right to get her away from this place. It's like people around here aren't happy enough sharing the same however many square feet of town, they have to share their sadness over two boys most of them didn't even know.”

Chon nodded, holding the door open for Ana. He went behind the counter and opened the register.

“You left me two tens,” he looked at Ana.

“Just drop some from the safe,” she said on her way to the back.

“Ana,” Chon said when she came back with her purse on her shoulder, “they come once a week to fill the safe. We'll run out of tens if we drop them so many times.”

It was Sunday. Rocha was off, so Ana had worked the first shift.

“Sorry, Chon-Chon, I promise I'll be a good girl from now on and be real careful with the register,” she said, walking out.

“Ana,” he called to her, “have you even closed your till?”

She stood in the doorway and stared at him. “No. Will you count it for me?”

“You know, you're a cashier. You have to count every now and then,” he said, opening the drawer and counting the money in it.

“Not to close my till, not when you're here to do it for me,” she said with a smile.

He looked up at her and rolled his eyes. A girl no older than thirteen walked into the store. She wasn't from Greenton, but Chon thought he recognized her. Ana walked to the counter, putting her purse down to wait for Chon to run her numbers in the register.

The girl interrupted Chon's counting. “Do you guys sell the stars?” she asked. “The John stars?”

“Yeah,” Chon said, starting over on the dimes.

“How much are they?” the girl asked.

“$2.70…$2.80…$2.90…” He raised his index finger to indicate to the girl that he needed one minute. He wrote down the total.

“$5 a pop,” he told the girl.

“Okay,” she said. “I'll take five.”

“Alright,” he said. “That'll be $25. Just hang on a second. I have to open this register.”

There were only seven nickels in the register. Chon looked at Ana and at the nickel slot in the register. She shrugged.

“Isn't it open right now?” the girl asked. “My brother drove me over from Premont because you guys are the only store selling the real stars. We're getting one for his car, one for my parents' and some for our neighbors.”

“Well—” Chon began. Ana turned toward the girl.

“Listen, little girl,” she said, “he has to count the money in the drawer and put the total in the machine to close the last shift's totals. It'll take five minutes tops. But if you keep interrupting him, he won't be able to finish, and we won't sell you any damn stars. Understand?” Ana took the pack of Best Values from her purse and pulled out a smoke and her lighter.

Chon counted the pennies quickly, added the drawer total, and ran the numbers. The printout he put in an envelope with her credit card receipts said Ana's drawer was forty cents over. He input the total as his starting balance and rang up five John stars.

“Alright, sweetie,” he said to the girl, who was staring at her feet, “$25.”

The girl gave him two twenties. He gave her back three fives.

“You didn't have to—” he began to tell Ana.

“I know,” she said.

“She was just trying to—”

“I know. It's just I see a little girl like that, all happy and shit, and I want to shake her. I want to fucking strangle her, it just hurts so fucking much.”

Chon didn't say anything. He walked to the back room, slid the envelope under the office door to be counted along with the rest of the week's receipts by Sammy Alba, Art's cousin, tomorrow, like on every Monday.

Ana was standing at the front of the store, watching the girl from Premont tell her brother what had happened in the store.

“Ha,” she said, “he flipped me off.” She stood there, looking at the dust kicked up by the brother and his sister and the car that would carry them to their loving home three towns over. “We're out of Bud Light tall boys and Miller Lite caguamas,” she said. “And four of the microwave burritos were cut into. I think Rocha did it when he opened
up the box. I bagged them, they're in the cooler, leave a note for Sammy so he can write them off and order more beer.”

“Okay, Ana. Thanks,” Chon said.

Ana turned around and looked at him.

“Sometimes I just want to fucking scream. Hell, sometimes I do. I get home and I call detectives and call Bill and I cry. And then I get two days off, and I'm too sad to even go to Flojo's so I sit at home and drink and cry and, sometimes, I scream.” She gave a laugh. She always laughed at awkward moments. “I'll see you Wednesday,” she said.

“Well, I'll be here if you want to drop in,” Chon said. A month ago, she might have taken him up on the offer—showed up on her day off with leftovers and helped him mop the store or stock the cooler.

“I'll see you Wednesday, Chon-Chon,” she said walking out of the store.

She stood in the doorway trying to light her cigarette. When the wind wouldn't let her, she crouched down in the corner made by the ice machine and the storefront. Small as she was, she disappeared from Chon's sight. She could have been crying or curling up in a ball to give up on life or crawling away in the thirty seconds she was down there.

She popped up, cigarette lit, waved goodbye to Chon, and walked around the side of The Pachanga to get to her car. In the drive-thru window, Chon saw a woman tired and alone and who, in a bigger city, would fit right in pushing around a shopping cart and screaming at traffic passing by. She honked her horn when she pulled onto Main, waving at Chon with the back of her hand.