by Paul Langan
“Look at my face, Chago. This is what happened last time we talked. I got nothin’ to say to him. ”
Chago sighed and played with his lighter, making the flame flare up and die back. I almost felt bad for him, the position he was in. But that’s the way the world is, puttin’ you in bad positions and forcing you to make a move. Like Mr. Mitchell said, you have to make a choice.
No one ever said choosing was easy.
“He got your mom’s schedule from his sister, Martin. He knows she’s working late this weekend. Saturday night. That’s when he’s coming, when you’re alone,” Chago said, his eyes like storm clouds. “You didn’t hear this from me. ” He turned and started walking back across the street.
Watching him, I knew Chago was still my homie. He made a choice by risking his neck to warn me. It was more than many people would have done.
“Thanks for coming down here, Chago,” I said as he left. His head was down, his eyes low. He didn’t once turn back.
From now on, I was on my own. And Frankie was coming.
My head was spinning as I made my way home. Frankie was going to make a lesson of me. In a way, he had no choice. Everyone would think he was soft if he allowed me to stand up to him. People would start talking. His reputation would suffer, and then younger wannabe’s would push and test him to get respect. I’d seen it before. He had to prove to the rest of our crew that there was no questioning him.
But how far would he go? At the least, he’d give me a beating I wouldn’t be able to walk away from after a day. Maybe worse. I remembered the doctor’s words just before I was discharged from the hospital.
“Another shot to the head could cause brain damage. ”
I knew what another fight with Frankie would be. More shots to the head. Harder ones.
“I ain’t never seen him so mad. ” Chago’s words echoed in my head.
This time Frankie would be more brutal than ever. I kept picturing the way he kicked the kid at that party. The horrible wet crushing sound it made. Frankie would give me the same treatment. No, he’d give me worse.
By the time I made it home, fear was digging at me the way rats clawed through the walls of our old apartment. My mother was still at work, and it was dead quiet as I walked in and locked the door behind me. From the shadows at the end of the hall, Huero smiled at me from his picture.
“I might be seeing you again soon, little brother,” I said crossing myself the way we do in church.
Getting beaten isn’t what scared me most. I’d been through that enough times as a kid with my father. Once, when my mother was pregnant with Huero, my dad got drunk and started swinging. She fell trying to get away from him, and I jumped in between them.
“Stop it, Papa! You’re hurting her,” I screamed.
He hit me so hard my teeth pierced my lip like glass ripping through an old trash bag. I was on the floor in a puddle of blood when he left in a storm of English and Spanish curses. That was one of the last times I saw him. Eight years ago, and I still have a scar on the inside of my lip from the stitches, his only lasting gift to me.
At the time, my mom called me her hero, saying I protected her and my brother. But she never understood that it was fear that pushed me, not bravery. Fear that if I didn’t act, I’d lose them. Fear that I’d fail to keep my mom and brother safe.
Huero’s death made those fears real, turned them into wounds that hurt worse than any bruises Frankie could give and scared me more than any threats.
Pacing in my apartment, I felt these fears again, driving me like hunger. If Frankie was coming for me, if he was going to bring everything he had against me, I wouldn’t survive. But there was something I needed to settle first. A problem that would make my life a complete failure if I didn’t solve it. One that would turn me into a restless ghost if I died before I could finish it.
I looked at Huero’s picture and knew where I had to go. It was not about Frankie or Chago or Bluford. It was about Huero and the person who shot him.
Time was ticking. Frankie was coming. Ramirez had done nothing. I needed to move while I still could. I needed to find justice for my lost brother.
The next thing I knew, my feet were taking me away from our apartment to the bus stop on our corner. Without a word, I boarded the bus to Tanner Street.
To Hector Maldenado’s house.
Chapter 6
It was about 4:30, and the October sun was still high overhead when I stepped off the crowded bus onto Tanner Street.
I’d been to the neighborhood a few times before. Huero had one of his little league games with the Police Athletic League in a park just off Tanner Street last year. Ramirez was an assistant coach with the team. That’s how he and my mother met. Huero played center field.
Frankie and I had also been through the area in his car a few months ago when we were looking for Huero’s killer. Frankie said he had a girlfriend that used to live not too far from the park. I remember the conversation because it was funny.
“This girl was so fine, homes. But she was bad news too. She used to hide knives in her hair just in case,” he’d said.
I laughed because Frankie had no room to say anyone was trouble. He was the one with the gun hidden under his seat.
“She had to be trouble to put up with you,” I said at the time.
“It’s true. If I had a daughter, I’d never let her near me,” he said. “You neither, homes. You’re a mess,” he joked, gunning the LeMans back home.
Tanner Street was a lot like my old neighborhood. Just a 15-minute bus ride from Frankie’s house, about 40 minutes from Bluford High, the area was all Chicano.
Small one-story stucco houses faced each other on both sides of the street, some with little gardens, a few with statues of La Virgen, the Virgin Mary. Many houses had iron bars on the windows too, just like our old place.
Leaving the bus stop, I spotted a mural on the side of a nearby garage.
Increase da Peace, it read in faded silver and black letters the size of a person’s chest. Beneath the words, the artist added an image of a maroon lowrider cruising in the sun, chrome wheels sparkling like diamonds. Between the words and the car, two giant brown hands were painted as if they were coming together in a handshake. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the neighborhood was safe, that peace was on the march.
But more recent than the mural were the gang tags painted on the walls of nearby buildings. One even covered a corner of the mural, an insult to the art and its message. I didn’t recognize the name, but I knew it was a sign of who was in charge. Hector’s house was up the street. My fingertips started tingling, and my palms got sweaty as I moved closer.
If my mother knew where I was, she’d never let me out of the house again. And if she had any clue what I was doing, the tears would be flowing down her face in full force.
“If anything happens to you, it will kill me, mijo,” she’d wail.
Truth is, I didn’t know what I was doing as I walked up the block. Dogs in houses on both sides of the street started barking at me. Brown kids with faces like mine stopped playing to look at me as I passed by. On a nearby porch, I saw an elderly couple watching me. They were all people who knew not to trust strangers walking in their neighborhood, but there I was.
Chago’s words were ringing in my ear.
“The dude in the middle gets hit from both sides. You can’t survive that. ”
But I couldn’t stop myself. It was like I was possessed as I marched up the block and spotted the homies outside 2187 Tanner Street, Hector Maldenado’s house.
There were four guys standing next to a blue Ford pickup parked on the street. Another dude was behind the wheel, and other people were in front of the truck, though I couldn’t tell how many because the hood was up.
“Homes, you ain’t never gonna get that thing to start,” said one guy without a shirt. He had a beer in his hand and a tattoo of a spider’s web on his right shoulder. I could see it from halfway down the block. He was my
height but bigger and more muscular.
“Man, give César a chance. He fixed it last time. ”
“Yeah, but that was before . . . you know. ”
“Yo, why don’t you shut up about that, man? Show some respect. ”
“Relax, homes. I’m just bein’ real, that’s all. ”
“No, you’re bein’ real stupid. ”
I was close now. Maybe about ten yards away. If they weren’t all looking at the truck, they would have noticed me walking right up the sidewalk. I still don’t know what I was thinking or planning to do. Just looking for answers. For proof. A reason.
Maybe I was looking for something else too. An ending. I don’t know.
“Try it now,” a voice yelled from the front of the truck.
The dude behind the wheel turned the key, and the old Ford came to life in a cloud of blue smoke that I could have hidden in if I were smarter or saner.
“I told you’d César would get it working. Your brother’s still got his skills, Hector. ”
“That’s ’cause I’m the one who taught him,” came the response.
My heart was racing as I stepped closer. I needed to see their faces if it was the last thing I ever did. I was just ten feet away when I first heard footsteps behind me.
“Yo, homie, whatcha looking for? I hope it’s a bus stop ’cause this ain’t your ’hood. ”
The whole crew surrounding the truck suddenly turned to face me.
“You know him, Hector?” the dude behind me asked.
Two guys came around from the front of the truck then. One of them, a stranger to me, was standing, wiping grease off his hands with a rag. The other appeared a second later in a wheelchair. I knew his face.
In my head, I was at that party again. I was watching Frankie lean over a guy who was on the ground, hearing the thud of his boot as it slammed into the poor dude’s stomach, dodging the foamy vomit as it poured onto the floor at our feet. The guy had looked up at me a second before the impact. Burned his face forever into my mind. I’d seen it many times in nightmares since the fight, but it was never in a wheelchair. Never with legs so thin and weak.
“No, I don’t know him,” said Hector, the guy holding the rag. He stepped toward me. “You looking for trouble, homes?”
My eyes were still locked to that wheelchair. I nearly went down right there in the street.
Please tell me it’s not true, I told myself. But in my heart I knew it was. No one could have walked away from what Frankie did that night. Me, Chago, and the rest of the crew knew it, but we never said anything. Instead, we pushed it back. Buried it.
But some things can’t be buried.
For a second, I was frozen. Paralyzed. The answers I searched for since Huero’s death came crashing through my skull like a gunshot. It started with César and Frankie talking trash at the party. Then Frankie took it too far. He crippled César with that kick. Hector wanted revenge. He came after Frankie and found him on my block.
But Hector’s aim was off.
And bullets don’t have names. They cut down anyone. Everyone. Even eight-year-olds who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My legs suddenly felt weak. My stomach started churning. Before me were Huero’s killer and Frankie’s victim. One boy dead. Another in a wheelchair. And for what? I wanted to scream.
For what?!
Respect? Revenge? That ain’t nothin’! Neither could fix César’s legs, bring Huero back, or empty the graves of all the fallen kids lying in them now.
The world was spinning, and I felt like it was about to fling me off like a piece of garbage. Another life lost in the barrio, just like my brother. Another world crumbled into dust.
“Are you high, homes? You musta got some bad weed or somethin’,” the big guy said with a laugh.
“I don’t like the looks of him. Is he packin’?”
In an instant, hands were all over me, searching for a weapon I didn’t have, one I knew I couldn’t use even if I held it in my hands.
“He don’t even have any money. You know he’s gotta be usin’,” someone said.
I got shoved to the ground and landed on my backside in front of a group of guys who were my enemies but didn’t know it. They were no different than my old crew, and one of them had suffered too, would suffer for the rest of his life from the looks of things.
It was all too much. I felt like a blister about to pop. I had to get away, or I was gonna lose it. But if I told them the truth about who I was, it would be the end of me.
“I’m lost,” I said to them. It was all I could say.
“You damn right, you’re lost. You’re in the woods now, homes. ”
“Man, I told you he’s high. Vato loco. Stay away from whatever he’s smokin’!”
“Five-O,” someone yelled then, and the crew backed away as a black and white police car pulled up next to us.
“Again? That’s the second one today,” someone else added. I knew the reason. It was because of what I told Ramirez. I was sure of it.
“Is there some kinda problem here?” I heard a different voice say, though from the ground I couldn’t see much. Then a car door opened.
“No problems, Officer,” the big dude said. “Hey, why don’t you pick up our trash for us. This boy’s as high as a kite. ”
I looked up to see a white police officer, maybe in his early 30s, sizing me up like I was a crime scene.
“You okay, son?” he said slowly like I couldn’t understand him. “I see your eyes are red. Have you been smoking something I should know about?”
It was the same old deal with the cops in the barrio. Here they were in front of a killer and didn’t know it. And here I was with my eyes red from tears, and I’m accused of using drugs. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The world is messed up.
“I just need to get home,” I said.
“Let’s take you to the station first,” he said, helping me into the back of the police car. Funny how my first time in a cop car was the one time I hadn’t done anything wrong.
The crew watched as the cop pushed me into the backseat. César had wheeled around close and studied me, his stare cutting me deeper than any blades.
Tears rolled down my face as the car started moving. The questions that had haunted me for months suddenly had painful answers.
“You sure you’re okay, kid?” the officer asked, eyeing me in the rearview mirror.
I shrugged and stared out the window. There was no way I could tell him what was going on inside me, the sudden twisting I felt deep in my bones. Like I was an old rag and someone was wringing me out, wrenching me from the inside.
“I don’t know what you’re hiding, but you’re one lucky kid,” the officer said. “We just increased patrols on this block this week. If you’da been here before today, no one would have found you. ”
“Yeah, I’m real lucky,” I said wiping my eyes. I knew my talk with Ramirez was the reason the patrols were added, but I didn’t say anything. The officer had probably saved me, but I didn’t care. Sitting in the caged backseat of the police car, I didn’t feel lucky or saved. I felt cursed.
Hours passed before my mother finally arrived at the station. By then, she was so upset that she could barely look at me.
“I don’t know what to do with you anymore, mijo. My manager at work is upset with me because I keep leaving work early. And if I miss another day, we’re gonna have trouble paying the bills. I keep praying, but I can’t seem to get any answers,” she said sadly as we walked into the apartment close to 10:00 p. m.
Just seeing her made me ache inside, but I didn’t have any words that would make her feel better. I didn’t have any for myself.
She wiped her eyes and shook her head. I was standing in front of my bedroom door. I hadn’t told her or anyone what I saw. How could I explain that I felt like a bomb had blown out all that remained of me after Huero’s death?
My mom started praying then, turning to the candles and the picture of Hu
ero.
I closed my bedroom door, shut out the lights, and felt hot tears crawl down my face in the thick darkness.
Chapter 7
Suddenly I was on my hands and knees.
Struggling. Unable to move. Something tight was looped around my neck.
I look down and see black cords stuck through my arms and legs. Holding them like chains. I look up and see a giant web. Like the one in the tattoo on Hector’s friend.
I was caught in it.
Nearby are two bodies I recognize. Huero and César. But further out there are more. Countless others I don’t know. An endless sea of bodies, gray and still in the dark. Their eyes are closed. But mine are wide open. We’re stuck in the web together.
I try to free myself, but I can’t move. There’s no sky and no ground. Just blackness swallowing us like the ocean.
I scream but no sound comes from my mouth . . .
“Wake up, mijo. You’re dreaming. ” Mom’s words startled me out of my sleep.
I sat up and threw the blanket off my arms as if it was the web that held me. My T-shirt was soaked with sweat. My heart was pounding.
“What is it, mijo?” my mom asked, turning on the light next to my bed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Ma,” I said, wiping my face and taking a deep breath. “Just a crazy dream. ”
She sat at the foot of my bed. Her tired, bloodshot eyes looked like two cracked windows. Since Huero died, she seemed ten years older. And my troubles only made her age faster.
Watching her, I wished I could stop the suffering I caused, go back and redo that night at the party, or change that afternoon last July when Huero died. Mr. Mitchell was right to talk about choices, but all the ones I made were wrong.
I’m so sorry I put you through all this, Ma. I wanted to say, but the words didn’t come. Instead, I just looked at the clock to avoid her eyes. It was 3:33 a. m.
