She said, “It bothers me, yes.”
Pause. Then he said, “Nothing good can come of this.”
“Nothing has to. It’s good as it is.” She tried to turn to face him, but he held her as she lay and she didn’t want to fight him. “We would be left wondering, later, how we would have been, together. I’d rather remember than wonder.”
“Ah yes,” he grated, “later; when they stick a catheter in it, and I become one great tottering system of failed and rotting pipes. Have you ever read up on cancer deaths? No, of course not, why should you? It’s something one does when one first finds out.”
All right, she thought, this had to come, don’t let it fester, let’s deal with it right now. “Ricky, love, I’m not perfect. I can’t promise that I won’t turn away from you later because of changes in your body. And I can’t alter the likelihood that you’ll be dead long before I will, and that it’s not fair. But I won’t talk about this with you, not lying skin to skin. When we’re in bed together, we’re in bed. You understand?”
His grip on her body became live again, though not strong. He would never be strong again. But he wasn’t playing corpse now, and he buried his wet face against the back of her neck and whispered, “Yes, I understand.”
“What have you done with the covers?” she grumbled after a while. “Half of me is sticking out in the cold. My mother used to say, never marry a skinny man. (She said ‘marry,’ not ‘sleep with,’ because she was an old-fashioned girl.) The little bit of meat on a skinny man won’t keep you warm at night, she said.”
“My mother said, ‘Be prudent, Ricky dear. Foreign women are usually not as forward nor as backward as common knowledge would have them.’”
Their basic understanding held and did not need to be remade each time they went to bed together during the week that followed. It was simple, really: sometimes they were playful and sometimes not, and sometimes they clung together and rocked each other in silent commiseration like two frightened apes in a laboratory cage. What they did not do was tear at each other.
They filed the letter and its translation away in her desk. As if by common consent and without further discussion, they let the subject drop. This was not as difficult as she had expected: the dreams ceased, or at least were suspended for the time being.
Ricky walked less often and less far, ate less (although Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream could still tempt him), rested more. He came out to the wall with her only occasionally and sat reading in the shade, not books on French history any more but a novel that she had brought him from the bookstore, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
They did not go in for hand-holdings, pecks on the cheek, and pats on the behind. He never spent a full night in her room, but always withdrew to his own well before morning. How proper he was, how articulate and courteous (except when a certain delightful silly-streak came out, most often in bed). She concentrated on how English he was rather than how sick. Most often they did not have sex because he was not up to it. They merely made love.
At times she thought, all this should surely be more complex: extremes of rage, grief, withdrawal, rushing together, torment and desperation. Instead, perhaps because she and Ricky had never imagined a shared future, the present seemed an overwhelming gift.
6
Roberto thought Mr. Escobar looked kind of silly up there on the band-platform with the microphone, so sober-looking next to the musicians. They stood around in the scarves and belts and feathered hats they wore, looking bored while he talked. The party was roaring along already, people milling around in their good clothes looking for places to dump paper plates emptied of hot meat, coleslaw, beans, and whipped Jell-O. Nobody seemed to be paying a whole lot of attention to what Mr. Escobar was saying and the microphone kept making squeaks and popping noises like gunshots.
Roberto was bored. He’d spent some time riding with Horacio on his bike with purple streamers attached to the handlebars, tearing along the rough dirt track that circled the field, until people complained about dust getting in the food. Sitting with his mother and Blanca and Great-uncle Tilo on an old blanket, he wolfed down fried chicken and canned pop, looking around and ignoring his mother’s comments.
She was upset about Mr. Escobar and Pinto Street Protection, like a lot of the older people on the street, and she’d been on his case to quit hanging out so much with the Maestas brothers.
“— Thieves!” the microphone bleated.
Talk, talk, more talk. No inspections had been made since the street closing. Pinto Street Protection had nothing to do, and all Mr. Escobar knew was to talk some more and get other people talking. The Maestas brothers were not interested in taking the fight right to the construction company themselves. It was all turning into a drag.
“Wait a minute,” somebody yelled. “You mean this inspector offers money for your place after he tells you it’s no good?”
“Start over and go slower,” a woman shouted. “We couldn’t hear you.”
A big sweaty guy in a torn t-shirt yelled, “Music! If you don’t sing, give the mike to somebody that does!”
Roberto got up. “I’m going to get some more to drink.”
“Take your plate and put it in the garbage,” his mother said. “And no beer, Roberto. You’re too young.”
Good thing the guys he liked to drink with behind the bowling alley weren’t around right now to hear that! What a bummer.
He strode away carrying his plate and stepping around other groups of neighbors parked on the trampled grass or bare ground. If some of them saw him with a beer in his hand they’d tell his mom.
He didn’t need his family right now, and it sure didn’t look like Pinto Street Protection needed him. Jake and Martín stood by the amplifiers, big strong guys that made people look and listen just by being there. They hadn’t asked Roberto to stand with them. His mom should know how if it wasn’t for Pinto Street Protection, they wouldn’t know he was alive.
Some of the younger guys were down by the Y construction. That was where Roberto and the Maestas brothers had gotten orange traffic cones to close the street with. Now some guys had climbed the fence. You could settle down inside the half-finished building and slug down some beer without anybody bothering you, get a nice buzz on. Maybe there’d even be some stuff left lying around you could take and sell someplace.
The Y was going to take away the field, turn it into a running track and a parking lot, fence everything in probably, so why not take something back?
“Hey, Ollie!” he shouted, spotting Ollie Rivera at the fence, just starting to hoist himself over, his t-shirt hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans like a flag.
Ollie stared over his shoulder with his mouth open. Behind Roberto people started yelling and screaming.
Roberto turned.
Cops in black uniforms tore through the crowd from the other end of the field. More cops spilled out of a pair of cop-cars pulled up by the curb. He saw a night-stick whack down and somebody went staggering, right into a tree, blind because of his bloody hands over his face. Everybody was running and screaming every which-way. Two guys charged to meet the cops with bottles in their hands.
Where were Mom and Blanca and Great-uncle Tilo? Roberto ran back where he thought he’d left them. He swerved around a man sitting on the ground hugging his knee and groaning. Where were they, where?
Jake Maestas was hollering something you couldn’t make out over the mike. Betsy Armijo, still in her bridesmaid’s dress, ran past with her mouth open and no sound coming out, holding one high heeled shoe in each hand. Like Mina, the other day, but Mina would be fighting, not running.
There was the blanket — at least he thought that was it, though it was all rucked up and trampled, and there was no sign of Blanca or Mom or Great-uncle Tilo.
Shit. Where were they? He panted, more with panic than breathlessness.
A cop shoved past him, pushing along some guy he had by one arm twisted up in back.
R
oberto swore, and threw himself on the cop. They all fell. Something hit his head like the world falling on him, and he blacked out.
Blanca tore free of her mother’s hand and ran toward the loud speakers and the trees, across the line of charging cops.
Someone tripped her. When she got up, nursing a bruised knee, a man, a stranger, grabbed her arm and tried to pull her along with him. “Come on, come on, those cops are crazy,” he panted. He crashed into a woman running across his path, and Blanca spun away from him. Her chest was tightening. She thought she heard her mother screaming her name. Veering from the sound she ran into the arms of Martín Maestas.
“Go home, run,” Martín shouted, pushing her away.
She no longer knew in which direction home lay. Ahead of her, people milled and shouted. Someone staggered out of the press streaming blood, slack-jawed like a stunned ox in a slaughterhouse.
It’s like a movie, she thought, the blood is so red.
She turned to look again for Martín and her foot slipped on a flattened soda-can. She went down on her hands and knees. She could see Jake Maestas up a tree, kicking at the cops who clustered underneath and grabbed at him. The loud speaker wedged between two branches near him let out a terrific burst of crackling explosion, like gunfire from an automatic weapon. Somebody must have stomped on the microphone.
A cop stopped running and spun around, his black boot inches from Blanca’s fingers, his pistol upraised in both hands over his head like he meant to shoot the sky. Blanca saw with surprise that he was very young and that he was terrified. He was staring, she saw, at some barrels full of iced drinks. Somebody had just dodged down behind them. Blanca saw the glint of something between the barrels, and at that instant the cop brought his gun down in both hands and fired.
In her whole life Blanca had never heard anything so loud. She clamped her hands over her ears as the barrels spat splinters and rocked on their bases. Somebody heaved himself up from behind the barrels and stood there leaning on them. It was Mr. Escobar, his face blank with shock. He had a metal beer-opener in one hand, and he held out the other like he was trying to show the cop his red-smeared palm. There was red on his shirt-front. The cop stared at him, wild-faced, still aiming his pistol with both hands.
Blanca scrambled to her feet and ran. She could hear more shots and people screaming.
Martín was in front of her again, his shirt torn and his mouth open wide for breath, showing his empty gums. He gripped her by the shoulder and shook her.
“I told you, hija, get out of here!”
Out of nowhere a cop, a hurtling dark shape in his dark uniform, charged. Martín dodged and kicked out. The cop jabbed the end of his night stick into Martín’s middle. Martín flipped double with a whoofing sound that was lost in the other cries. More cops came running like stampeding black horses. The nearest one hauled back his stick to hit Martín again.
The time that came with the asthma moved slowly, drawing out the agony. Blanca was already in that time. In a second she would fall, writhing and breathless while everything moved away from her. Everything would happen around her to others, while she was sealed off in her cocoon of suffocation. For her, nothing more would happen but the asthma.
While she could still act, drawing on her rage at her own body’s treachery, she plunged toward the nearest cop as his night stick came down. She heard a great crack of sound and thought, as her upflung arm went numb, they exploded my arm! There was no pain. She was too absorbed in straining to expel the last of her spent breath so that a fresh one could be drawn. Not to be able to do that, that was pain.
Roberto woke up. It was dark. His head ached. Whatever he was lying on was lumpy and nasty smelling. Shit, it was that old mattress in the abandoned Estrada place. He and Horacio had snuck in here a few times to smoke and put away a six-pack. What was he doing here? He groaned. Somebody hissed at him, “Shh. Keep quiet.”
“Who’s there?” He was scared. His head was killing him. How bad was he hurt? He remembered jumping that cop. He sat up and groaned again; he couldn’t help it. Was this jail after all?
“Talk low, Beto.” Somebody came and crouched next to him, smelling of beer and sweat — Great-uncle Tilo.
“Ow, my head hurts.” Fearfully he explored his tender, crusted scalp with his fingers.
“Drink this.” His hand was seized and folded around the smooth shape of a pint bottle.
He swigged down a tingling swallow and coughed. “What are we doing in this dirty old place?”
“They won’t look for you here. They think you’re on the way to Mexico already with Martín Maestas. Only keep your voice down, hijo. They come cruising through once in a while, and you never know who’s been talking.”
“You mean I’m supposed to be hiding out? Why? I didn’t do anything. I mean, I jumped a cop, but they attacked us, man.”
“I know.” Great-uncle Tilo settled himself on the mattress next to Roberto. “I saw. That cop whacked you a good one. Juan Lopez jumped on him. I ran over and got you and carried you home. Only your mother doesn’t want you there now because they came looking for you. Somebody’s been saying it was all set up by the Maestas brothers and Dolfo Escobar, and how you and The Archuletta twins been hanging out with all of them. It didn’t help either that they got you on the tv from the street closing, glaring out past Jake Maestas like a wild bull.”
Bewildered, Roberto drank from the bottle again. “I don’t get it. Set up what? Why did the cops run crazy all over everybody? Is Mom all right? Blanca?”
“Sure, they’re fine. Thing is, the cops say it was some kind of radical plot to whip up a riot in Pinto Street because the street closing didn’t get us anyplace. And then there was the shooting. They’re looking for what they call the ring-leaders.”
“Shooting?” Roberto shivered hard. “I don’t remember any shooting.”
“You were out cold by then. I think some cop thought the microphone noises were gunshots and opened fire.”
“At who? Who was shooting?”
“The cops, and I don’t know who else; some guys are always carrying. It doesn’t matter who it was. The cops will throw a few guns in the weeds there, the kind they keep in the trunks of their cars for these kind of things. They say we started the shooting. Three people got shot and one cop. They’re not going to take the blame for that.”
“Three people and a cop?” Roberto couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A cop! At least we got one of them, then.”
“Maybe,” Great-uncle Tilo sighed. “Anyhow, that’s why they’re looking for you and Martín so hard, because a cop got shot. That’s why they better not find you.”
“I didn’t shoot anybody! I didn’t have a gun!”
“I just told you about the guns, hijo.”
Roberto felt like crying, probably because his head hurt so bad. “Who else got shot? I don’t understand why anybody got shot.”
“Juan Lopez has a bullet through his hand; he’s okay. A woman I don’t know from Reyes Street got hit in the leg. Rudolfo Escobar got shot pretty bad. He’s still in the hospital. Critical, they say on the tv. And this one cop, he’s serious but not critical. Everybody knows Mexicans can’t shoot straight.” He belched. “He probably got hit by one of his own buddies, all the banging away they were doing, but you’ll never get them to admit that. Then there’s a bunch of people that got beat up pretty bad. Jake Maestas is in the hospital with his ankle all smashed to hell. They have to do an operation on him. Our own Blanquita has a broken arm. She’s got a hell of a big white cast on it, and they sent her home so full of pain pills she can hardly walk. I guess they don’t think they can get away with locking up a young girl like that who’s got asthma. Everybody else that didn’t run like hell they handcuffed and hauled off to jail.”
“But what for? We were having a party!”
Great-uncle Tilo’s good hand pressed against Beto’s lips, silencing him. Softly the old man said, “They say on the news the cops got a phone call. Somebody
told them that a mob from Pinto Street was going over to burn down the new Y building because of thinking it’s the Y that’s changed the zoning so their houses have to be condemned, which is crazy, but you know how people misunderstand things. The cops came loaded for a wild-eyed mob, so that’s what they saw.”
“Who would tell them a thing like that?” Roberto could not imagine telling such a lie. It left him awed.
“Somebody who didn’t come to the party. Somebody who’s all of a sudden not around, gone to visit relatives in T. or C. they say. Somebody that stomped out of our house because he couldn’t spy anymore, once we had him spotted.”
Pete Archuletta, he meant. I should have gone after him at the meeting in our house, Roberto thought dismally. I should have killed the son of a bitch, me and Jake and Martín should have just killed him.
Great-uncle Tilo’s ropey old arm came across his shoulders and hugged him hard. “We’ll get you safe out of this mess, don’t you worry, mi hijo. Go on and cry, go on, just try and be quiet, all right?”
Blanca had wrapped an old green sweater around her cast so that the white plaster wouldn’t gleam in the moonlight and give them away. She listened with delicious dread to every creak of branches in the bosque of willows and thorny Russian olives and the soft sliding hiss of the river.
“I don’t see why I got to run away,” Beto repeated sullenly for the tenth time.
And for the tenth time Great-uncle Tilo explained: “Not run away, it’s just leave for a while. We all talked it over. It’s too risky for you to hang around here. You’re scaring your mother to death, Beto. The cops are on a tear. She’s afraid for you.”
“Well, I’m not afraid.”
Liar, Blanca thought. Of course he was scared, and it was stupid of him to lie about it, but what else could you expect from Beto? He wasn’t about to admit that he was plain petrified, now that the thrill of hiding out had worn thin.