Wrong Thing (2 page)

It would often be said that the Kid could not fight without weapons, that he was a coward when you got him unarmed and one-on-one. But few people would ever want to test that theory, because it would also be said that, having beaten him, you would have to go into hiding or else never stop looking over your shoulder. Because the Kid would be patient, and, when you least expected it, he'd pull something out of a pocket or from under a shirt, and you'd bleed.

If he was white and his family had money, the Kid would probably have been given therapy and then sent to a Montessori school. But he wasn't white, and the family was poor. So he was locked up for a while and then let out and sent to another school. And if it made any difference to him, nobody knows about it.

T
he Kid liked the barrio. It felt like home, even though his parents didn't give him a home, only a place to stay. He was never abused in any way that Child Protective Services could have acted on—his father rarely hit him, and his mother never did. They didn't even raise their voices to him very often.

But they didn't do anything else with him either. They never talked with him or asked him about what he was doing, his friends, or the books he was reading. All they had, they gave to his sister. The Kid had four shirts, two sweaters, one coat, and one pair of pants. Celeste had a wardrobe. The Kid's room contained a bed, a dresser, and nothing else, not even a radio. Celeste had a TV and a stereo system that their parents had bought for her on credit. There were many days when the Kid went to school without a cent in his pocket, but Celeste never had to.

The Kid didn't mind at first. When he was very young, he didn't know he was poor. He just assumed it was normal. As he got older, he began to realize that Celeste had more than he did, and that kids who didn't live in the barrio had more than his entire family. The other kids at school were afraid of him, so not many of them made fun of his poverty. One who did ended up transferring to another school out of fear that the Kid would do something to him—and, in some stories, the Kid still found him.

But the other kids didn't have to make fun of him. He felt it anyway. The worst time was when the school was showing a movie as part of a history project. The movie was free, but the teachers created the atmosphere of a movie theater, selling soda, hot dogs, nachos, and popcorn, thinking it would be more fun for the students. It was, but not for the Kid. He didn't have any money. It wasn't too bad during the movie, but afterwards, when the students were hanging out, talking with the teachers, the Kid was the only one not eating and drinking.

“Don't you have a Coke?” one of the teachers said. She was trying to be kind. The Kid could tell that she was going to offer to buy him something. But he didn't want her to know, and he didn't want the other kids to know, so he just said he didn't want anything. The teacher let it go, but she knew. The other kids had heard her, and they knew too.

The Kid was never able to ask for anything, or even take most things that were offered to him. At his first school, when he'd been friends with Rodrigo, he'd sometimes go to Rodrigo's house when the family was having dinner. He'd sit at the table with them, but he'd never eat anything. Rodrigo's mother would offer him food, and he'd always want it, but he'd always say no, that he wasn't hungry. He didn't know why he did that, but he always did.

By the age of fourteen, the Kid had more money than most of his peers. He could always find a job, though he could never keep one for long. And he was already selling drugs.

His parents never asked where his money came from, they just told him that he'd better not ever bring the cops to their door.

And the Kid was content.

He didn't mind his parents' indifference. He had never known anything else. And he was indifferent to them, and to Celeste. He didn't mind them, but he didn't particularly like them, and he certainly didn't love them. As long as he had a room in their house, they served their purpose.

He liked being in the house. He liked walking through the barrio on cold winter evenings, seeing the lights coming from the houses, thinking of all the families cozy inside, sitting in warm rooms eating and talking and watching TV. The Kid liked doing that too, going into his parents' house and sitting in their living room reading a history book. His father would have come home from his warehouse job and would be watching TV or talking with Celeste. His mother would be in the kitchen, making dinner. The Kid was grateful to be there.

Not that he ate the dinner his mother served. Her cooking was vile. Because of her, the Kid had a lifelong dislike of Mexican food. Even in the summer, when the barrio was full of people cooking carnitas outdoors, the Kid couldn't join in. He knew the food was excellent, but the smell was so close to the smell of his mother's cooking that his brain couldn't talk his stomach into it. He liked the feel of all the people hanging around outside, cooking and drinking beer. But he wouldn't eat the food, and he wasn't old enough to drink.

From the age of thirteen, the Kid did his own cooking. When he'd complained about his mother's cooking, she'd said, “If you don't like it, don't eat it. Cook your own dinner.” She didn't mean it, but the Kid took her at her word. He went to the library and got some books on cooking. His mother didn't have much of the equipment mentioned in the books, and there were many ingredients he'd never heard of. It didn't matter. He made do with what he had. When a recipe included ingredients he wasn't familiar with, he'd go to the store and ask about them. It wasn't long until he could quickly figure whether an ingredient was essential or just a garnish.

His mother didn't like her position as family cook being challenged, but there wasn't much she could do about it. Her husband and daughter both preferred the Kid's cooking to hers. He would bake or grill fish, stir-fry vegetables and meat, cook pasta, bake bread, and marinate pork, lamb, or chicken. He liked cooking for his parents and sister, even though he didn't like them much. He loved being able to do something well, to produce something that people appreciated and that made them feel good. For the rest of his life, the Kid would hate restaurants that served uniform, generic food, prefrozen and heated up by rote, like items being assembled on a factory conveyor belt. What the Kid liked about cooking was the care that went into it. He said that when you were making a meal, you should always be thinking of the people who would eat it. “Then you'll do it good” he said. “You'll do it nice.”

When he grew up, the Kid should have been a chef somewhere. But that couldn't happen, because he'd have had to go to a college, a cooking school, and that was something that couldn't happen for him. That wasn't who he was. And he could never have tolerated being the cook in some joint where you just take something from the fridge and put it in the microwave.

W
hen people say that the Kid couldn't fight unless he had a weapon, they're mostly right. It's true that he didn't like to use his fists. He never grew to be more than five feet six, and he never weighed more than a hundred and twenty. Most men were stronger than him, and he knew it. He'd probably never have learned anything about fistfighting if his first girlfriend hadn't been a boxer.

The Kid was fifteen and spent most of his evenings hanging out. After cooking dinner for his family, he'd wander across the barrio to the house of a guy named Tommy, who was twenty-one. Tommy's place was a gathering point for kids. His door was always open, and when you walked into his living room it was like walking into a bar or café. There was no carpet on the concrete floor, but there were three couches and some chairs. Tommy had gotten one of the couches from his mother and the other two from thrift stores. He worked in a copy shop, and aside from that he just hung out full-time. On any evening of the week, there would be anywhere from twenty to thirty kids there, aged from about fourteen to twenty-two. The room always smelled of weed. On weekends there were parties, and as many as a hundred people might be there before the cops showed up to send everybody home and bust whoever they could for drugs or curfew violation.

Lisa hung out there a couple nights a week, the nights when she wasn't training. She was fifteen, and she spent most of her nights at the boxing club. She hadn't had a fight yet, because there wasn't an abundance of teenage female boxers to choose an opponent from. But now they had found someone for her, and she was about to make her debut.

She was heavyset, but not fat, with the big hair, heavy makeup, and big earrings favored by cholas. Some of the guys were attracted to her, and others thought she was gross. But nobody came on to her except for some of the older guys. She had a mouth, and the younger guys were afraid of her.

The Kid liked her, but he didn't know what to do about it. He never got to talk to her much when they were at Tommy's. She talked a lot, and the Kid hardly talked at all. He wasn't shy, he just couldn't think of things to say in a big group. He would sit there and look at Lisa and smile at her and not say anything. When he got home he would lie in bed and think about her, imagine kissing her and touching her, and he'd come in his hand. He never imagined fucking her, because he couldn't imagine fucking, couldn't imagine what it would feel like.

One night at Tommy's, the Kid said, “Hey, Lisa.”

“Yeah, what?” The place was busy. She was sitting on the floor, drinking soda and talking to a couple of girls.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Yeah” she said, but she didn't move from her position on the floor. Her friends grinned at each other, seeing what was up.

“Can you come outside for a minute?” the Kid asked her.

“Yeah, I guess.” As she stood up, she looked at her friends and bugged her eyes, and they laughed. The Kid went outside and stood in the front yard. Lisa followed, but she took her time.

“So. What can I do for you?” she said.

The Kid felt his ass contract, and he almost told her to forget it. But it had taken so long for him to screw up enough courage to approach her, he didn't think he'd be able to manage it a second time. It would have to be now. So he did something that nearly always worked for him when he was scared: he pretended that he was outside of his body, standing behind himself like he was somebody else, watching himself do it.

“Nothing much” he said. “I just wanted to ask you if you want to hang out with me sometime.”

“We already do. We hang out here.”

“I mean, just with me. It's okay if you don't want to.”

“That's okay. I want to”

“When?”

“How about tomorrow night?”

Tomorrow was a Friday, and the Kid had some business to take care of. “Gotta work tomorrow,” he said. “How about Saturday?”

“I'm fighting Saturday night. My first one. You want to come see it? We can go out after”

“Yeah, that's cool.”

She told him the time and place. Then she motioned towards the house. “You going back in?”

“Nah. I gotta be somewhere.” He didn't have to be anywhere, but he couldn't handle the anticlimax of going back in the house and just hanging out. Maybe Lisa would change her mind if she had to look at him that long.

“Okay, Saturday” she said. Then she went inside.

The Kid walked home, across the barrio, past the Circle Ks with the vatos standing around outside, past the bars and the taco stands under the streetlights and sky. A big muscle car crawled along the street and pulled up behind the Kid. He looked over his shoulder, saw the guys in the car and stopped walking. The car drove away.

When the Kid arrived home, his father was asleep on the living room couch and his mother and sister were watching TV. They didn't say anything to the Kid, and he didn't say anything to them. He went to his room and lay on the bed and thought about Lisa while he jacked off. After he came, he was still thinking about her, and he thought about her for a long time.