Last Summer of the Death Warriors

  “Which Pancho is it going to be?” he heard an imaginary Marisol ask as he closed the doors of the phone booth. I guess it’s going to be this one, he said to her. He took a blank piece of paper and a pencil from his shirt pocket. He studied the other piece of paper and then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He dialed the first number.

  “Jensen and Sons.” It was a woman.

  “Uhh. Yeah. Can I speak to Bobby?”

  “Bobby who?”

  “I don’t know his last name.”

  “Hon, I can’t help you if you don’t have a last name. I got about four Roberts here, and as far as I know, they could all be Bobbys.”

  “He was in Las Cruces a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s got to be Robert Lewis. Hold on a second, I’ll connect you.”

  Shit. She was connecting him. Should he hang up? He stayed on the line. He took a deep breath. Stay cool. It would be a lot easier to stay cool if he didn’t have to talk.

  “This is Robert.”

  He gulped. “Robert Lewis who works at Jensen and Sons.” He forgot to make it sound like a question.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I have a package for Robert Lewis who works at Jensen and Sons.”

  “Yeah, this is Bobby Lewis. I work here. What is it? What kind of package?”

  His heart pounded. His mind went blank. He was talking to the man who killed Rosa.

  “Hello? You still there? What do you need? What kind of package?”

  He clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut. He put the receiver of the telephone against his forehead and bit his lips to keep the words he most wanted to say from coming out.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “It says here I’m supposed to deliver it to your home at 25 Marisol Drive, but I can’t find your house.”

  “Maybe that’s ’cause I don’t live at no 25 Marisol Drive. What kind of package is it? Are you from UPS?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who’s the package for?”

  “A Robert Lewis.”

  “Well, that’s me all right. Where’s the package from?”

  Silence.

  “Hello! Are you still there? Who sent the package?”

  “It’s from Josie’s.”

  “Josie’s? I didn’t order no package from Josie’s.”

  “I could return it.”

  “No, go ahead and deliver it. Probably something my wife bought.”

  “I can do that. What’s the correct address again?”

  “145 Handel Road.”

  “Thank you.” He hung up. He noticed that the receiver was moist from the sweat on his hands. He wrote down the man’s full name and his home address on the blank piece of paper. He was surprised at himself. He didn’t think he was capable of coming up with words as fast as all that. Marisol Drive? Josie’s? It was funny the things that came out when you didn’t have time to think.

  He climbed onto the bicycle and rode back slowly toward Casa Esperanza, the quarters jingling in his pocket. His mind replayed the sound of Robert Lewis’s voice. The voice sounded old and tired. He sounded the way D.Q. sounded sometimes, like there wasn’t enough air in his lungs to push the words all the way out. Pancho tried to remember some of the words from the Death Warrior Manifesto that D.Q. read the night before. The moment when death shows you that you will die. He remembered those words because he had actually thought about them and had concluded that death had shown him that his life would come to an early end, just like it did for his mother, father, and sister.

  A car was honking at him. He waved it on with his left hand. He couldn’t move any farther to the right even if he wanted to, and there was plenty of room to pass. Still, the car honked. He stopped and turned abruptly to tell the driver what to do with himself when he heard his name called out. A white sports car pulled up beside him, and a dark glass window slid down automatically. D.Q.’s mother lifted her sunglasses and rested them on top of her head. “Hello there,” she said, waving. “It’s just me. Do you have time for a cup of coffee?” Now someone was honking at her. “Oh, shush!” she said to the car behind her. “It will only take a minute. I’ll meet you there.” She pointed to the convenience store at the end of the block. Then she waved again, placed the sunglasses back on her nose, and drove away slowly.

  Pancho rode into the parking lot of the convenience store. She was waiting for him, standing beside her car with two paper cups of coffee in her hands. He stopped the bike next to her and put down the kickstand but didn’t get off. She handed him the coffee. “Sugar and milk all right?” she asked. He nodded, even though he liked his coffee black, and took the cup from her. Her car was sleek and new, the kind that only seats two people. He thought it must be funny to see the rusty rickshaw with its unopened beach umbrella and the fancy car next to each other. He took a sip of the coffee and waited for her to speak.

  “This is an interesting contraption.” She looked over the rickshaw.

  “It works,” he said.

  “Mmm. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to get a new one. There must be places that sell them on the Internet.”

  He waited again. There must be a reason she wanted to talk to him. What was she doing driving around five blocks from Casa Esperanza anyway? “D.Q.’s not doing too well,” he said. “He throws up a lot.”

  She made an expression like she knew all about it. “Actually, he’s doing better than expected. I just came from Dr. Melendez’s office. His blood counts are holding up. He doesn’t think the side effects are so severe. I mean, he thinks Daniel is doing quite well with the program. He’s hopeful that he will be able to continue with the treatment.”

  Pancho felt like telling her that Dr. Melendez had obviously not seen D.Q.’s pale, green face or heard him retch in the middle of the night or cleaned up after his nosebleeds. He had accompanied D.Q. to nearly all his treatments and sat next to him during most of them and not once had he seen Dr. Melendez. “Continue treatment? He has only two more treatments left.”

  “Followed by a two-week recovery period. Then after that we’ll continue with another cycle of treatments.”

  “For how long?”

  She took a slow drink of her coffee. “Until he’s well.”

  Pancho dropped his head on his chest. He felt like D.Q. would have felt at that instant: deceived, trapped. This lady was never going to let D.Q. go back to Las Cruces. He raised his head again and met her eyes. “You lied to him,” he told her.

  The smile on her face said she knew she had lied but she didn’t care. Nor did she care what he thought of her, he could tell. “You’ll like living at the ranch. I fixed up the room over the garage, next to Juan. Have you ever ridden horses?”

  “No. I never rode no horses,” he said with an edge, pretending he was even more ignorant and backward than she thought he was.

  “My husband just bought a young racehorse. You can help Juan train him.”

  “Who’s Juan?”

  “He works the ranch. He’s been with us forever.”

  A wave of nausea came over him. He looked for a place to dump the coffee.

  “All I ask is that you give me a chance.” She was wearing a pink skirt and a white blouse without sleeves. He felt the touch of her hand on his arm—the softest hand that had ever touched him. He glanced down at the hand and she removed it. “You’re going to be very comfortable there. It is where Daniel should be…while he is going through this.”

  He remembered D.Q.’s smile, the one he saw on his face whenever D.Q. saw or talked to or talked about Marisol. Wherever Marisol was, that’s where D.Q. should be. That’s where he would want to be. Pancho got off the bicycle and walked over to the trash can at the side of the store. He dropped the cup inside, still full of coffee, then went back and grabbed the handlebars. He stopped. She was waiting for him to say something. “D.Q. thinks you’re gonna pick him up this Saturday.”

  “Friday at eleven is his last treatment.” She sounded busin
esslike.

  “One of the girls who works at la Casa invited him over to her house for dinner on Friday. He’d like to go to that.”

  “Oh?” She seemed surprised.

  “Yeah.”

  “I made some plans for Friday. I was going to pick you all up after the treatment.”

  “It will go easier all around if it’s on Saturday.” Friday afternoon, while D.Q. rested, was the day he was going to check out Robert Lewis’s house. Then on Saturday, he would go with D.Q. over to his mother’s. He had promised to stay with D.Q. for two weeks after the treatments were over and he planned to honor that promise. After that, all bets were off. But he wasn’t pushing a Saturday pickup because of his own plans. He had no intention of going to Marisol’s house, even though he had been invited and D.Q. insisted that he should go. He just knew how much D.Q. was looking forward to the dinner. The lady had to understand that Friday afternoon would not do.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said, perking up. “I’ll pick you guys up on Saturday if you come with me now. I want to show you something. It will take about an hour.”

  Pancho looked at her suspiciously. She was an attractive woman, her blond hair shining in the sun and her lips a rosy color he had never seen before. He had heard of older women…“What for?” he asked, shaking those thoughts out of his mind.

  She grinned, as if she could tell from past experience what he was thinking. “I want you to meet someone, someone who can help Daniel. And who knows, maybe he can help you as well.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “We all need help, sweetie. Come on. One hour, that’s all I ask.”

  “What time is it?”

  She turned her wrist and looked at the tiny, brilliant watch. “It’s only two P.M.”

  The rickshaw rides generally started around four. But sometimes, a few non-nappers were ready to go even earlier than that. “I gotta get this back.” He patted the bicycle seat.

  “Hold on.” She lifted one finger and disappeared into the convenience store. When she came out, she said, “All taken care of.” She was waving a key. “We can lock it up by the Dumpster.” She motioned for him to follow her.

  Behind the store, she unlocked the door to a wooden enclosure and he pushed the rickshaw in next to the Dumpster. Then she closed the door and locked it. She was smiling, happy with herself, it seemed, for her brilliant solution to the problem of the rickshaw. They went back around to the car.

  “I need to get back by three. There’s some kids expecting me,” he said, sinking into the car seat.

  She smiled briefly in his direction. He didn’t get the sense that his schedule mattered to her. She started the car and shifted into reverse and then first, her movements both smooth and forceful. She waited only a second before she lurched into the street.

  There was classical guitar music coming from the radio. She turned it off. He waited for her to tell him where they were going, but she drove in silence, like she didn’t even know he was there. Her hand gripped the top of the steering wheel tightly. He looked out the window. She went up a ramp, got on 1-25 South, and pressed down on the accelerator. The car’s engine hummed.

  There was something uncomfortable about the way the lady was all smiles and friendly one minute and stone cold the next. She was definitely strange. D.Q. was strange as well, but in a different way. D.Q. was always the same weird, a steady weird. You could count on who he was. With the mother, you had this uneasy feeling, like you never knew what you were getting.

  They were heading away from the center of town, away from the mountains. A billboard advertised genuine Hopi Kachina dolls, and Pancho thought of Rosa.

  After five minutes of fast driving, they got off the highway. The exit sign read rio bravo boulevard. They turned onto a road lined with stores that sold Native American crafts, and drove past a parking lot full of cars. Pancho couldn’t figure out what all those cars were doing in a little town and then he saw the sign for a Baptist church. A few blocks later, they turned onto a street with crumbling adobe houses. In front of the first house on the street, a child was trying to keep a tortilla out of reach of a yellow dog. A satellite dish in the backyard was bigger than the house. They slowed down. For the first time, Pancho noticed that a cloud of dust was trailing them. They were on a dirt road. Two men without shirts leaned against the hood of a truck, drinking beer. They stopped talking to watch them drive by.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s safe.” Those were the first words she had spoken since they got in the car.

  He turned and glared at her. Why on earth would she think that driving through a poor neighborhood would ever bother him? She was the one who should be afraid, with her rich, fancy car and her golden hair. “I don’t worry,” he said, looking away from her.

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I figure I’ll find out one of these days.”

  She cracked a smile and shifted down into second. The engine made an unhappy sound, like it didn’t like to be reined in. “I think you’re going to like Johnny,” she said. A chicken fluttered out of their way.

  “Who’s Johnny?”

  “Johnny Corazon is a shaman. You know what that is?”

  “Nope.”

  “He’s a healer, a spiritual doctor. He’s going to help Daniel.”

  “Help him do what?”

  She pulled into a driveway and turned the ignition off. There was immediate silence. She seemed to be looking for a way to explain something that was difficult to explain, or maybe she just thought he was stupid. He didn’t think the question he asked was all that hard. She turned so that her back was against the car door and she was facing him. “Cure him. He’s going to cure him.”

  “A witch doctor?”

  “Not a witch doctor, a healer. Just a gifted healer of body and soul.” He kept his eyes fixed on her to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. She went on. “The body and the mind are one. What you think and what you feel affect your health. Western medicine, the kind that is treating Daniel back at the hospital, is for his body, but what about his mind? Healing will come when the mind is healed.”

  “D.Q.’s mind is working pretty good,” Pancho asserted. “Most of the time I don’t even understand what he’s saying.” He thought maybe that wasn’t saying all that much.

  She was silent for a moment. Maybe she was wondering if he was capable of understanding her. Then she said, “Daniel does not believe he can be healed. He needs to believe. Johnny Corazon is going to help him believe.” She raised her eyes and looked at the house in front of her.

  Pancho looked at the house as well. On the brown door, he could see a big red heart with the word “JOHNNY” in black, piercing it like an arrow. The house was not painted or even plastered. Pancho could see straw sticking out of the raw adobe walls. The wooden beams that sustained the flat roof were rotting. He could feel the sweat on the back of his shirt. A giant wooden cross leaned against a fence. It was one of those crosses people carried on their backs during Easter services when they were pretending to be Christ. He sighed. He was paying a high price for D.Q. to have an extra day with Marisol.

  “Do you have any questions before we go in?”

  “Yeah. What does all this have to do with me?”

  She looked dry and cool. The woman did not sweat. “If you have faith in Johnny, Daniel will come see him. It’s as simple as that.”

  He chuckled to himself. There it was again, that word. The more he heard it, the less he knew what it meant. He pulled on the door handle, but the door didn’t open. The little kids back at the Casa would be looking for him soon. “Let’s get this over with,” he told her.

  “When I met you at the hospital, I was delighted. I thought you would surely be receptive to nontraditional kinds of healing. Your background, I thought, would have given you access to…natural medicines like herbs, for example. You must have heard of curanderos, right?”

  He smiled at
the Anglo way she pronounced the word. “Cure-andero?” he asked, mimicking her pronunciation. He shook his head. Their medicine cabinet, in the tiny trailer bathroom, had Pepto-Bismol for the stomach, aspirin for the head, and hydrogen peroxide and Band-Aids for the rest of the body. That was it.

  Someone tapped on his window and he saw a big, brown face on the other side of the glass.

  “Johnny!” he heard the woman exclaim. She turned the ignition on and rolled down the window.

  “Are you guys coming in or what?”

  Pancho’s instant impression was that the man had the face of a drug addict. It was either a young man’s face that had aged before its time or an old man’s face trying hard to look young. The skin on his jaws sagged, his brown eyes floated in a web of red lines, and his greasy, long black hair was pulled back and tied in a braid.

  “Hello, Helen!” he said, waving his fingers at D.Q.’s mother. “And you must be Pancho. Pancho! Pancho! Pancho! A powerful name!” Johnny Corazon stuck his hand through the window and held it in front of Pancho’s face. Pancho pretended to shake it by grabbing the top of it with his right hand. Maybe at one time it had been a workingman’s hand, but not anymore. “Well, come on in. I’ve been waiting for you.” He opened Pancho’s door.

  “Wait!” D.Q.’s mother said. “I brought you a little something.” She reached behind her seat and pulled out a brown paper bag. Two cartons of Marlboro menthol cigarettes were sticking out of it.

  “Wonderful!” Johnny Corazon said, grabbing it and inadvertently whacking Pancho on the side of the face. “Oh, excuse me, Pancho,” he apologized. “I ran out of smokes this morning. You’re a lifesaver, Helen.” He moved back so that Pancho could step out of the car.