Roberto got up too, brushing the dust from the seat of his jeans. “Okay, just leave me off where I can thumb a ride.” Shit. You’d think with that fancy watch of his, Bobbie could keep track of time better — Anglo time.
Already starting down the steep back-slope, Bobbie turned. “listen, bro, why don’t you come to class with me? It’s only drawing, everybody’s pretty terrible at it, and you don’t have to know anything much. I’ll run you home after.”
“Shit, no, man, I’m allergic to school.”
“This is different, I told you.”
“It’s all the same.”
Bobbie stepped back, elaborately casual. “You’re not scared, are you? Come on, man. I’ll come down to help close Pinto Street next week, okay? Cut class, everything, to be there too. I’ll do that. You scared to come to a little art class with me today?”
Hell, when he put it like that — Roberto shrugged. “You’re crazy. The teacher won’t let me in anyhow.”
“Yes she will. They’re real cool at this place; nobody gets fussed up except maybe if you did dope right on the doorstep.”
Bobbie’s life, Bobbie’s kind of friends. Roberto was curious. He was a little nervous, too. Nervous about some Heights kids in some kind of playschool? No way he could really be scared of that!
“I don’t know about pictures, art, that stuff,” he said.
“So what? That’s what they’re supposed to be teaching you.”
Blanca’s sister Mina had her ride to work already. Their mother put on her long, sagging sweater-coat. She left early on the mornings that she went to work in the discount store, because sometimes the old clock in her bedroom slipped a couple of minutes.
Blanca, finishing her cereal, said nothing. She was afraid she would let out the secret if she spoke: today was the day, and Mom didn’t know. That suited Blanca. She would rather die than tell. She was furious with her mother over this asthma camp that her mother had gotten her into somehow. What a bummer — a whole camp full of asthmatic brats, and they made you go swimming and climbing and all kinds of things they thought you should be able to handle. Blanca had had enough of that with her Phys. Ed. teachers in school.
Mom insisted that these camp people were experienced, they knew. Hell they did. Nobody knew, not even the doctors. Look at all the different things the different doctors at the clinic had told them over the years: exercise, don’t exercise, take this medicine, take that one, you’re taking too much, you’re not taking enough, don’t over-protect your daughter, she’s being allowed to do too much. Nobody knew.
Blanca had refused to talk about it at all. She kept silent to avoid bursting out with the anger that would probably trigger an episode.
What if the camp people gave her the wrong medication, or they had some doctor there with a whole new plan and it was wrong? Here in Albuquerque Blanca knew the dangers. What if there were different pollens up there in the mountains to set her asthma off?
Her own mother wanted to expose her to these dangers: her own Mom, who was supposed to “understand.” Boy. She watched her mother hunt for bus tokens in the cracked sugar bowl on the sideboard. All she understood, Blanca thought bitterly, was how mad and scared it made her when Blanca had an episode. You didn’t have to be a genius to guess how sick Mom was of the whole thing, years of it now. Let’s push it all off on some strangers for a while, give the family a break.
The only one who never got a break was Blanca.
Besides, imagine leaving Albuquerque in summer, when there was so much to see — people living on the porches and in the yards of Pinto Street to escape the heat, and the exciting business today of the street closing that Mom didn’t know about and Blanca wasn’t supposed to know about, but of course she did. Knowing things was her best protection.
At the door her mother looked back. “Quita, you’re sure you don’t want to come to the store with me today?”
“I have this report to finish, Mom.”
“All right, but you stay inside, Blanquita, hear me? No running around. And don’t forget your relaxing exercises and your medicine. You know where the doctor’s number is. You sure you feel okay this morning, mi hija? I don’t like how you look.”
“I’m sure, Mom.”
At last Mom was gone, and Roberto was slamming drawers in his room looking for something. Soon they’d all be gone. All you had to do was be patient.
Blanca washed her cereal bowl and went into her own room. She shut the door and then opened it a crack again, quietly. She listened to her brother getting ready to leave. Her older sister didn’t know she was alive, her mother fussed over her too much, and her brother thought he could boss her around. That was how it was, being the youngest and having asthma. With Mom and Mina gone to work, Beto acted like he had the whole place to himself.
“Hey, Quita!” he yelled finally, “got a pen? I can’t find nothing to write down license numbers — shit, there’s nothing in here but a bunch of stupid crayons!” She could hear him rummaging furiously in the kitchen drawer that served as a catch-all.
“Here,” she said, tossing him a pencil she had already chewed. “Where are you going to be?”
“At the ditch,” he said. Pinto Street ran east at right angles to Fourth, the major road up the north valley, and ended at the big irrigation ditch that ran along Second Street, parallel to Fourth. The access to Pinto from Second, across the plank bridge over the ditch, was to be Roberto’s station. “Me and Horacio and John Archuleta. I could do it myself, but it’s going to be more fun with some other guys around.”
He left running, but slammed back in again almost at once. He grabbed a bowlful of cold potatoes out of the fridge and dashed out again, hollering with his mouth full, “Hey, Horacio! Wait up!”
At least he’d remembered to take food. They were supposed to guard the two entries to Pinto Street’s short length, Fourth on the west and Second on the east, all day long. The chances were pretty good that Beto would not come barging back in here at lunch time and find her gone.
Blanca waited a little before she went to the kitchen to get herself something to eat outside: a chunk of cheese in its cellophane wrapper and an orange. She hated cold cooked leftovers.
Back in her bedroom, she took off her bathrobe and laid out fresh underwear. Out of habit she looked in the long mirror on the closet door, the mirror that her sister Mina used for her preening. To Blanca it showed nothing new and nothing good, reminding her merely that there were reasons why her mother babied her and the others bullied her or forgot she existed.
Her arms and legs were sticks like broomsticks. But that was better than before, when the doctor had her on corticosteroids and she had swollen up and couldn’t stop crying. Another doctor had finally taken her off that stuff and given her cromolyn powder to inhale instead. Now she was thin, little and thin, and they said — she wasn’t supposed to hear — that she would stay little. The corticosteroids had permanently stunted her, that was what the new doctor had said in a roundabout way until Mom pinned him in a corner and he said it straight out.
Mom said, you’ll be like other kids, give the doctors a chance. There was another doc at the clinic who said that Blanca would begin to grow again now and “fill out.” That was what they always said, meaning, start looking like a cow, like Blanca’s sister Herminia. As if you weren’t a human person, if you were female, until you got great big tits. That was going to be a while, because Blanca was fifteen and still didn’t menstruate.
Mom never gave up. She had even let Great-Uncle Tilo try the old trick of getting a Chihuahua dog and tying it to the bed that Blanca slept in so the dog would take the sickness from Blanca. Blanca remembered being devastated when it didn’t work. That was back when Blanca still thought Great-Uncle Tilo could do things, before she realized what being a drunk really meant.
Mom always said, I’m not mad at you, mi hija, I’m mad at the asthma. A lie; Blanca could feel it.
Mom said, you’re a girl like the other girls, Quita
, and you have to learn how to live like them. They had had a huge fight about that because Blanca had voiced her own thought: that she wasn’t a girl, not really. A girl is somebody who grows up and gets married and has babies of her own. Nobody was going to marry Blanca. If she had babies they could be sick like her, so why would anyone want to have them with her?
I will always be a kid, she thought, staring at her knobby knees in the mirror. But people forget about kids when important things are going on. People pay no attention to kids.
She shivered with excitement over what she intended to do. Actually, she was pretty scared, but you couldn’t just lay around being sickly, not when everybody was gearing up for this big effort and even dumb, punky Beto was in on it.
She put on one of Roberto’s old t-shirts, a pair of bleached out jeans, and sneakers on her bare feet. The sneakers dated back nearly two years now. She had not outgrown them yet, although her toenails had worn a hole in the rubber rim of the left one. The thing was to look like some anonymous boy from a neighboring street. Otherwise some well-meaning pain in the neck would spot her and take her home to keep an eye on her until Mom got back.
Her thick hair she stuffed into a baseball cap that Roberto had worn one summer. The cap still smelled of his hair-stuff, ugh.
She put her medication in her jeans pocket, the one without a hole. Where she would find water if she needed to take pills she was not sure, but she’d taken them dry before, throwing her head back hard and working her throat, so that didn’t worry her.
A soft cotton flannel shirt, long-sleeved and faded, completed her outfit. It was a hand-me-down from Roberto that her mother wouldn’t let her wear out of the house because it was too boyish-looking. That was why Blanca loved it. She wore it whenever she could. With her lucky shirt she put on an identity so far from her own that she felt her asthma could not follow.
Dust still hung in the air of Pinto Street from somebody’s car or truck passing through. The houses looked so quiet in the morning. School was out, but most of the kids had gone to the church-sponsored teen outing today. Blanca could see two little kids playing by the sagging fence around the trailer park. Betsy Armijo was feeding the ducks in her yard, all dappled with the shade of the thorny Russian olives her parents had planted before Blanca was even born. Betsy liked to play invalid when she had her period, as if her cramps were the end of the world. Too bad she didn’t know what being really sick was like.
Blanca heard water running and dishes chinking in the Romeros’ kitchen as she walked by. Vallejo’s dog came scuffling out of his dusty yard and grinned at her, trotting along beside her for a little until Mrs. Ruiz’s big mutt began barking from inside her fence, and Vallejo’s dog veered off to go yell back.
Estelle Ruiz, the widow, was out watering her flowers in front of her place, a converted trailer with trumpet vines all over that were now beginning to blossom. She was old and ugly, but nice. Blanca walked fast. Mrs. Ruiz had sharp eyes.
Then that place the Ortegas kept working on while they lived in it, slowly patching it together over the seasons out of adobes, cinder-block, and faded black panels of rigid insulation board nailed over two-by-fours. They had a great big woodpile made from the dozen Chinese elms they had cut down when they started building. Slimy-wet and iron-tough under the bark at first, the wood had finally dried out so it would burn long and hot, and last winter the Ortegas had sold some off to their neighbors. Beto used to pretend he had black widow spiders from that woodpile to turn loose in Blanca’s bed.
The sawhorses were still out in Mr. Lopez’s yard where he’d been working yesterday, building a new coop for his chickens. He said Vallejo’s dog had run off with another hen, and next time he saw that dog he would kill it. Nobody ever saw Vallejo’s dog kill anything, but Mr. Vallejo never fed it and it was very fat, so it was assumed that whatever ran loose and disappeared on the street, Vallejo’s dog must have gotten it.
Blanca thought it was a pissy little dog, always digging its way out from under Vallejo’s chain-link fence around his bare dirt yard. She wouldn’t mind if Mr. Lopez did kill Vallejo’s dog.
Somebody had a tv on loud, soap music. And there was the big old salt-cedar that leaned out of the Roybals’ yard near the corner of Pinto Street and Fourth.
Blanca saw the young men gathered at the joining of the streets. They were lounging together, half-hiding the orange traffic cones behind their legs. Jake and Martín Maestas, Ramon Romero from Truchas, and for goodness sake, Great-Uncle Tilo! He sure looked dried up and funny with the younger men, but he looked sober, too. Somebody must have pushed him to leave his eternal card games and his bottle-passing cronies and come stand with the others like a man. He seemed dignified even, in spite of that beat up old hat of his and his crippled arm hanging like a knotted rope. He’d almost lost that arm years ago, working for the railroad.
The one who looked best, though, was Martín Maestas. He always looked beautiful to Blanca, at least until he opened his mouth to talk — something he did seldom — and you saw the gaps where he’d lost his front teeth. It wasn’t from fighting, as most people assumed when they looked at Martín’s wide shoulders and strong arms and the tattoos on his smooth brown skin. He’d stood too close behind the batter in a sandlot baseball game when he was younger. Sometimes Blanca thought his shy, quiet manner was all because of those teeth; other times she knew it was his nature. But he was a tough guy, too. Nobody messed with the Maestas brothers.
Today Martín wore a sweat shirt with the sleeves torn out to show his biceps, and pressed blue jeans, and boots. He had on his tooled leather belt with his name on it and the brass buckle in the shape of a charging bull. His hair gleamed black in the sun. He looked ready to take on a whole army.
Only nothing was happening. They just stood around and smoked and talked, and after a while Ramon Romero turned on his portable stereo so they would have some music.
People going to work had gone. No cars turned off Fourth or even slowed down. The young men looked bored.
Blanca, bored herself, headed back toward the ditch-end of Pinto Street. She would run a risk that Roberto, stationed there, would recognize her, but even that would be better than a lot of dull waiting around.
She went through the yard of the abandoned Estrada house and under the fence around the wood yard in the next street. From there she could trot down to the ditch and come toward Roberto’s end of things from Second Street.
The ditch was wide and deep, and those who still farmed in this part of Albuquerque’s north valley drew irrigation water from it. It ran alongside Second Street in a rough parallel to the Rio Grande further west, from which its mud-colored water flowed. Every spring the machines came by and dredged the ditch out and smoothed down the dirt along its banks. A fat new growth of weeds was already reclaiming the banks, and straggly elms gave a ragged shade.
Somebody was with Beto and the other boys from the street. It was Bobbie, Blanca’s cousin who lived in the Heights. He had an Anglo kid with him, a brown-haired boy with work boots on and corduroys and a torn t-shirt. The stranger had a big pad of paper under his arm. Bobbie was taking Horacio Ramirez for a ride on his bike up and down the ditch-bank trail, the bike shooting thin gray smoke and making a sound like a machine gun.
Blanca sat under the trees and ate some of her cheese, thinking about asking Bobbie for a ride. Maybe he wouldn’t even recognize her. He hadn’t been down here more than twice since his parents had moved to the mesa that sloped up from the river valley to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains — the new part of the city, full of new people from the east and west coasts. Anglos. This Anglo kid must be one of Bobbie’s new friends from up there. He didn’t look like anything special.
She decided to have one more look at the Fourth Street group. If nothing was going on she would come back here and try to get a bike-ride out of the day anyhow. It wouldn’t trigger an episode, not a little thing like that, just riding around.
She heard men talking as she nea
red Fourth. The orange cones had been lined up across the end of Pinto Street and backed up with sawhorses. A car that said “Sheriff” on the side was parked there, and Eddie the cop was leaning against the car and talking with the young men. Blanca moved into the shadow of the Roybals’ twisted salt cedar and listened.
“I’m telling you,” Eddie was saying patiently, “you can’t do it. Look, the street belongs to the city. You aren’t allowed to just block off a street like that. What if there was a fire or something, and a fire truck needed to get in or the Emergency Rescue people?”
“We got no fires today and no emergencies except what we’re trying to handle ourselves here,” Jake Maestas said. He had a fierce black mustache and a bandana tied, cholo-style, around his head. “It’s our street. We’re closing it to outsiders today.”
Eddie, who was short and stocky and crew-cut, pushed his cap back on his head and looked past the young men. “What is it, you having a block-party or something? All you do is, you call the city people and let them know, and everything is okay.”
Jake said, “But everything is not okay. That’s the point.”
Ramon Romero said to Martín in a tough voice, “What’s this guy got to do with this anyhow? He’s with the Sheriff, right? I thought we were in the city here, not the county.”
Ramon was a newcomer, sent down from the mountain village of Truchas to live with his aunt and uncle for a while. He didn’t know Eddie, who so often came by here to drop off Great-Uncle Tilo when he’d found him wandering drunk on Fourth Street.
Eddie answered for himself. “I know folks on this street and I see these barriers up and I stop, that’s all. I don’t think you want city cops swarming all over the place, do you? Not if you don’t have to. Let’s just talk about this, okay?”
“That’s what we’re going to do,” Jake said. “I just called the tv news from Mrs. Roybal’s. They said they’ll come up here. We figure if the guys that are after our homes here won’t come to us, we’ll go to them via the media, and we’ll tell them our message: lay off our homes, lay off our street, quit trying to rip us off.”