Last Summer of the Death Warriors

by Francesco X Stork

  Marisol’s face floated over him. He closed his eyes again and focused all his attention on the touch of her fingers on his neck. If he concentrated on that touch, the pain in his ear and his groin disappeared. He thought how good it would be to pull Marisol to him and have the touch of her whole body take away all his pain. He was stretched out on the ground someplace and she was kneeling beside him, her hand now on his pulsating ear. She was so within reach. All he had to do was open his arms and bring her down toward him. Lose himself in her.

  He opened his eyes again, lifted his head, and tried to stand. “Go slow,” Marisol said. She helped him sit up. He was in the middle of the aisle, the mangled cell phone at his feet. He looked around. A worried Josie was sitting in the seat above him. A man he hadn’t seen before towered over him. He was a policeman.

  “How are you feeling?” the policeman asked.

  D.Q. and the bus driver were talking to a second policeman. D.Q. seemed agitated. He was waving his arms, pointing at Pancho and then pointing someplace outside.

  “You bleeding anywhere?” the policeman said.

  “You don’t bleed when you get hit in the balls,” he said. Then he remembered that Josie and Marisol were within earshot. “Sorry.” He glanced at Marisol. She wasn’t smiling.

  The policeman asked, “Can you stand up?” He offered Pancho a hand. Pancho took it and pulled himself up. D.Q. stopped talking and came over to him.

  “What happened to those other guys?” Pancho looked down at the pieces of cell phone.

  “They took off when they heard us,” the policeman answered. “They were probably packing and didn’t want to risk getting frisked.”

  “Officers, I gotta get goin’. I’m waaay behind schedule,” the bus driver said.

  “You want us to call an ambulance?” the policeman asked Pancho.

  Pancho shook his head. “I’ll be all right.” He was tempted to feel himself down below. Parts of his body seemed to have ended up in the wrong places.

  The policeman bent down to pick up what was left of the phone. “You were lucky today. Those kids were probably high on meth. It makes people violent, crazed. They could have killed you.”

  “It’s my fault,” D.Q. said. “I asked them to turn down the noise and then I tried to turn the volume down myself.”

  “Who busted the phone?” the second policeman asked.

  “I did,” Pancho admitted.

  The second policeman picked up the broken phone parts. “Joe,” the first said, “I don’t even think we need to file a report here, do we?” He took a long look at D.Q. and then at the wheelchairs. “You coming from the hospital?”

  “We’re from Casa Esperanza,” Marisol answered. “We were going to the zoo.”

  “That’s that place for kids over by the golf course. We can give you a ride back there.”

  “Can we still go to the zoo?” D.Q. asked. “I mean, if Pancho feels okay.” He looked at Pancho.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Yeah!” Josie piped in.

  “You sure?” Marisol asked.

  “Sure.”

  “All right. You could probably file assault charges,” the first policeman said to Pancho, “but I’m not exactly sure you’re all that innocent, you know what I mean?”

  It was as if the policeman could see that he harbored just as much violence as the kid who kneed him in the groin. He could not interpret the look on Marisol’s face. It wasn’t pity. She seemed puzzled by him. Join the club, he thought.

  “Officer,” he heard D.Q. say, “it really was my fault. My friend was trying to protect me.”

  “You all have a good day, then,” the policeman said, his eyes still on Pancho. Then the two men left the bus.

  “Let’s all sit down now ’cause I gotta make up some time here,” the bus driver said. “I knew those kids were trouble. I never shoulda stopped to pick them up. They get on like they own the bus, they don’t pay or nothing. What can I do? I’m lucky they don’t beat me up.” She had her hands on the steering wheel and was looking out the side-view mirror. “Go on and sit down now.”

  Josie grabbed Pancho’s hand and pulled him down to her seat. D.Q. sat behind them, next to Marisol. They were all quiet for a while and then Josie said, “I want to see the chimpanzees first.”

  CHAPTER 23

  They were in front of the tiger pit, waiting to see them get fed. Marisol pushed Josie to where she could see the big cats a little better. Pancho stood next to D.Q.’s wheelchair and looked down. One of the tigers began pacing back and forth on a ledge. Apparently he smelled something, or maybe he just knew it was time to eat.

  “Do you think Marisol is mad at us?” D.Q. asked.

  “Why?” Pancho continued to peer down. He had never seen a tiger before and was surprised by the size of its paws.

  “She seems kind of quiet.”

  Pancho shrugged his shoulders. He too had noticed something come over Marisol after the bus incident—a distancing where there was none before. She was more subdued and less talkative. D.Q., on the other hand, seemed charged up.

  “It wasn’t very smart of us, was it? Back there in the bus.”

  D.Q.’s words reminded Pancho of the numbness between his legs. He adjusted himself slightly.

  “Everything still in place?”

  “Yeah.”

  D.Q. continued, “It was stupid. We endangered Josie and Marisol.”

  “You’re the one who started it,” Pancho said. He slid down and sat with his back against the ledge. He felt very tired.

  “I had no idea it could turn violent.”

  “Didn’t you see what they looked like?” How could someone so smart be so dumb?

  “I know, I know. I didn’t think I was making an unreasonable request. It was bad enough that he was talking on the phone as if no one else existed. The guy was yelling obscenities.”

  “Those people aren’t reasonable.”

  D.Q. bit his lip and furrowed his brow. Pancho knew that as far as D.Q. was concerned, the kids on the bus and Pancho were the same—they were all Mexicans. But he had always seen himself as different from the Mexican kids who sniffed glue or tattooed themselves with gang signs. Those kids were wild, angry with everyone, violent. And he was…what? He was…someone who didn’t care what happened anymore. He was going to kill someone in a few days, no matter what. Maybe he wasn’t so different after all.

  “I should’ve recognized they were high on something,” D.Q. said.

  Marisol walked up to them. She spoke to D.Q. without looking at Pancho. “We’re going to move on ahead. Do you want to wait here? Are you feeling tired?”

  “I’m feeling great,” D.Q. responded, full of pep. “We’ll follow you. I’m not keen on seeing raw meat.” He put his hand over his mouth and made as if he were going to vomit. It elicited a smile from Marisol.

  Pancho slowly stood. He positioned himself behind the wheelchair and pushed. He wished he were the one sitting in the wheelchair. The zoo was crowded with groups of children in T-shirts announcing their various summer camps. They ran back and forth in packs from one exhibit to another. Pancho had to dodge baby carriages pushed by parents who were looking everywhere except where they were going. People tried not to stare at D.Q., but they did anyway. They stopped to admire an elephant taking water from a pond and spraying his back. They watched a male lion sprawled totally unconscious in the shade of a red flowering tree. The female nearby kept a sleepy guard. They saw orangutans leapfrog each other and heard chimpanzees screech with terror or delight, Pancho wasn’t sure. The Mexican wolves paced back and forth on top of a mound of dirt. They had tall, skinny legs, but they were not much bigger in bulk than Capi, and they kept their heads down, as if they had just been caught doing their business inside the house.

  They bought hot dogs and sodas at the Cottonwood Café and ate outside. D.Q. took one bite of his hot dog and stopped eating. He spit what he had bitten into a napkin and folded it. He asked Pancho to get him a cup of ice. Pancho
got him one and D.Q. chewed the ice chips. Marisol smiled and listened attentively to Josie. Pancho saw D.Q. look longingly at her and sigh. Pancho took a deep breath and volunteered to take Josie to the camel ride. Just before he left, he saw Marisol edge her chair closer to D.Q.

  The camel ride consisted of a man with a white ponytail leading an old-looking camel by a rope while a little kid sat on a special seat located in front of the camel’s humps. Josie told Pancho she wanted the camel to kneel down so she could climb on, but the man with the ponytail led the camel to a platform with stairs up to it instead. Josie insisted on getting out of the wheelchair and waiting in line standing up. She was afraid the ponytail man wouldn’t let her on if he saw her in the wheelchair and thought she couldn’t walk. “Because you hold on to the camel with your legs”—she had read that somewhere.

  “How was it?” he asked her when she climbed down.

  “It was bumpy. It was like riding on a mountain. I was scared. Could you tell?”

  He picked her up and sat her in the wheelchair. “You didn’t look scared.”

  “I was holding the scaredness in. I’m good at that. Sometimes. Except when you were fighting with those mean boys on the bus, I cried then.”

  “I wasn’t fighting,” he protested. “Where to now?”

  “Can we go find the birds? I want to see the vultures.”

  “The vultures?”

  “Yeah. They’re awesome ugly.”

  “I don’t know where the birds are. Don’t you want to pet a burro? They’re right there.”

  “That’s the petting zoo. That’s for little kids. I’d rather see the vultures and then the Tasmanian devils.”

  “Those aren’t real. Those are cartoons.”

  “Silly. They are so real. They’re like dogs. They’re from Tasmania. That’s a place in Australia. Do you know why they call them devils?”

  “In the cartoon, they look like the devil, with the pointy ears and the fangs.”

  “Mmmm. And you know what? Almost all the Tasmanian devils are becoming extinct because they get tumors on their face.”

  “Where’d you learn all this?”

  “On the Internet. I think the birds are that way.” She pointed to her left.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw a sign that said ‘Aviary.’”

  Pancho had seen the same sign, but he had no idea what “aviary” meant. All those years at home living with his father and his sister, he had never felt ignorant, and yet clearly he was. He never used a computer, except occasionally at school. He did not own a cell phone or play video games. Back home, before everything happened, he thought of himself as bright enough. He knew where his left foot should be when he sent a left hook. He knew how to find the studs behind a plaster wall and how to lay a plumb line straight. He explained TV mysteries to his father and repeated ordinary well-known facts to his sister until they sank in. Now he felt out of place, like he did not belong in this city where even eight-year-olds knew more than he did.

  There was an empty bench in front of a cage filled with bright green birds, like the parrot he had carved, only smaller. He sat down. A woman in front of the cage had one of the birds perched on her index finger. A circle of kids surrounded her. “I think that bird talks,” Pancho told Josie. “Why don’t you go see what it says?”

  “Naah. I’d rather listen to you.” Pancho thought that at least he was more interesting than a bird. Josie was twitching her nose as if gathering her nerve to ask a question. “Why did you smash that cell phone?”

  Pancho covered his face with his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you thought that boy was going to hurt D.Q. and you wanted to protect him.”

  “Could be. But the kid wasn’t hurting D.Q.”

  “You got angry because they were teasing D.Q.”

  “I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel angry. I just up and did it. I don’t know why.”

  “The boy was saying mean and dirty words. He was loud too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you died when you fell. I cried.”

  “I saw you crying before I fell.”

  “I cried different tears after you fell. First I cried ’cause I was scared and then I cried because I thought you were dead.”

  He observed her carefully to see if she was telling the truth. “How can you cry if you don’t even have eyelashes?”

  She stuck her tongue out. “They fell off. Meany. Just for that, I’m not going to tell you a secret.”

  “Good.”

  “I won’t tell you even if you give me one million three hundred dollars.”

  “All right.”

  “I would have told you too.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not gonna tell you. Take it back a thousand times.”

  “All right, I take it back. Take what back?”

  “That I don’t have eyelashes.”

  “I take it back that you don’t have eyelashes. You have them. I see two. One there and one there.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you, but don’t tell Marisol I told you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to live?”

  “All right. There. I cross my heart and hope to…live.”

  “Marisol likes you.”

  “Is that it? I already knew that. What did she say?”

  “Will you buy me a snow cone?”

  “Maybe. If it’s not too expensive.”

  “You were giving a ride in the rickshaw to Phil and Kelly yesterday, and my mom, she said to Marisol, ‘He’s a hunk, isn’t he?’ And Marisol, she went ‘Mmm-hmmm.’ Like that.”

  “A honk? A honk? That doesn’t mean anything. That’s how a duck goes. Honk. Honk.”

  “Not honk. A hunk. And it does so mean something. When a girl likes someone, she calls him that.”

  “It was your mother who said it, not Marisol.”

  “Marisol went ‘Mmm-hmmm.’ That means like ‘For suuure!’”

  “You know what I think? I think we better go find D.Q. and Marisol. D.Q. is probably starting to get sick about now. Honk. Honk. That’s the noise the seals were making.”

  Marisol and D.Q. were still sitting in front of the Cottonwood Café. From a distance, Pancho could see that they were carrying on a quiet, serious conversation. D.Q. talked and Marisol listened. She held a paper cup in her hands and nothing seemed to exist in her universe other than D.Q.’s words. Now and then, she tilted her head and smiled appreciatively at D.Q. What could he ever say to Marisol that would make her listen and look at him that way? He could not think of one single thing. All he was and all he ever would be was a honk.

  CHAPTER 24

  He was tightening the brakes on the rickshaw with an old pair of pliers when he felt Marisol standing behind him. “I have some customers for you when you’re ready,” she said to him.

  “I’m ready. I’m just fixing the brakes.”

  “Brakes would be good,” she said. He glanced back just long enough to see her smile. It was the first time she had spoken to him in a friendly way since the incident on the bus three days before. “How’s D.Q. today?”

  “I just brought him back from the hospital. He’s in the room. He was looking for you.”

  “We were going to go out for our walk.”

  “He looks too tired to walk.”

  “Walking helps with the nausea. It’s not good to be lying down all the time even if that’s all you feel like doing.” She paused. Pancho shook his head to let her know he heard her. “It’s a good day for a walk. It’s not hot.”

  He gripped the right brake handle tight and pushed the bike at the same time. The front wheel squeaked. “The brake pads wore out.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Only if I have to stop.” He hadn’t meant to sound like a smartass; it just kind of came out that way.

  “We can buy some new ones. I can get La
urie to give us the money.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t go down any hills.”

  “There’s a bike store on my way home. I can buy the parts if you tell me what to get.”

  “It’s all right. The bike stops. See.” He squeezed the brakes and pushed. The bike screeched and slid, but the front wheel didn’t turn. Her presence irritated him, he didn’t know why.

  He saw her move her head back as if struck by the force of his words. There was neither hurt nor anger in her eyes. Instead, he saw kindness. Or pity. “What?” he said. He didn’t need anyone feeling sorry for him.

  “Nothing,” she said softly. Then she asked, “Who are you anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” But he did understand the question. He too had tried to go inside of himself and sort out the different people who lived there. He took a step backward and almost stumbled over the rickshaw.

  She moved closer to him. “It’s like you’re two people,” she said, looking into his eyes. “One Pancho is funny and kind and patient with little kids. And another is…I don’t know, angry. It’s like you can’t make up your mind what kind of person you want to be. I don’t know. Is there something bothering you? Is there something you want to talk about?”

  He snickered. “With you?”

  “If you want to with me, why not? Or with D.Q. You’re helping him so much. Why not let him help you?” She moved to one side and leaned against the bike. “D.Q. told me about your sister. I’m sorry.”

  He felt a pang of humiliation as he imagined D.Q. and Marisol talking about his sorry past. “It’s none of D.Q.’s business,” he said. He wondered what exactly D.Q. knew about his sister. He had never once talked to him about her. Back at St. Anthony’s, D.Q. had said, “Something’s eating you, I can tell,” and he had mentioned that in Albuquerque they would help each other out. How much did D.Q. know and how much did he tell Marisol?