Last Summer of the Death Warriors

by Francesco X Stork

  “Trying what?” Pancho went over to the bed and pulled back the bedspread.

  “I can’t believe I left the perico at Casa Esperanza. You’ll call…someone about it.”

  “Yes, I’ll call Marisol and make sure it doesn’t get lost. She can bring it over when she comes to see you.”

  “Juan can go get it. Tell him I said so.”

  “All right.” Pancho knelt down and untied D.Q.’s sneakers. He helped him stand up. “Those pants are full of puke.”

  “That was embarrassing. Puking in the middle of the freeway. Poor Helen.” D.Q. unbuckled his belt. He let his pants drop down and then stepped out of them.

  “What’s that on your legs?” Pancho was looking at blotches of red skin on D.Q.’s thighs.

  “Dry skin. The whole machine is breaking down. Would you mind rubbing some cream on my legs?”

  “I’m not rubbing nothing on you.”

  “It’s hard for me to do it and they’re very itchy.”

  “Hell no.” Pancho picked up the pants with his thumb and index finger and threw them across the room. He helped D.Q. pull his shirt over his head. “Why are your legs so shaky?”

  “I’m slipping down the Karnofsky scale fast.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a scale the medical profession uses to gauge where a terminally ill person is on his journey toward the inevitable. At a hundred the illness is there, but it has no symptoms. At zero, well, you can imagine where I’ll be at zero.”

  “Zero is zero.”

  “Correct.” D.Q. stretched himself out on the bed. Pancho covered him up.

  “Whereabouts you think you are now?”

  “On the scale? I think I was about eighty until yesterday. Then last night I sank to around sixty for some reason.”

  Marisol, Pancho thought. D.Q. had said she was coming to visit, but something else must have happened that D.Q. wasn’t telling him. “What’s thirty like?”

  “Around thirty you start wearing diapers.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly. And guess who will have to wipe my ass?”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m not wiping you.” Pancho took his backpack from the bed. He looked around for a safe place to put it. He opened one of two sliding doors. The closet was full of hanging shirts and pants. He put the backpack on the floor inside, then he pulled the chair from the desk and sat on it.

  “You want to hear a real tragedy?”

  “I thought you wanted to sleep.”

  “I will. I’ll tell you this and then I’ll sleep.”

  “I should probably help that guy Juan with the bed. He looks like he’s hitting twenty on that scale.”

  “Juan? Juan just looks frail. I was visiting here last year before I got ill and I tried to help him out in the barn. I couldn’t keep up with him. He’s been with Helen since Helen married rich.”

  “She married the lawyer.”

  “Yeah. Good old Stu. Stuart is his name but he likes to be called Stu. He does quite well, as you can see.” D.Q. closed his eyes for a few seconds, opened them, and then closed them again. “You know that pretty nurse, Rebecca? The one that made your heart go wacko every time you saw her?”

  “I know who she is.”

  “She rubbed my legs with cream once.”

  “Get outta here!”

  “I’m serious. It was at the beginning of this week. Monday or Tuesday, I’m not sure. You went out someplace. I had just finished with the chemo treatment and she noticed that the skin on my arms was dry. I told her it was worse on my legs. They were all red and blotchy. She asked me if anyone had taken a look at them and I said no. So she made me put on one of those nighties, and when she came back she said she was going to rub some cream on my legs. I was a little embarrassed. I mean, what if, you know, what if I had a natural reaction to her touch.”

  “You mean, what if you got a hard-on?”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  D.Q. continued speaking, his eyes still closed. “She rubbed cream on my legs. All over my legs, from my ankles all the way up, all around. She came this close to touching my private parts.” D.Q. lifted his hand from under the sheet and held his thumb half an inch away from his index finger. “The tube of cream, whatever it was she was using, fell on the other side of the bed, and when she reached over to get it, one of her beautiful, soft breasts touched my arm.”

  “Man, you’re dreaming.”

  “It’s the truth, Pancho. It’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not foolish enough to think that she was attracted to me. She was being kind. She was giving me the pleasure of her touch. Not because she felt sorry for me or anything. Just out of kindness.”

  Pancho waited for more to come, but D.Q. had stopped talking. Just as Pancho started to get up, D.Q. spoke again. “But nothing happened. Isn’t that the cruelest thing you ever heard?”

  “What did you expect? You think you were going to get laid right there in the hospital room? People walk in and out all the time.”

  “No, I’m not talking about that. I mean, nothing happened to me. There was no natural reaction in me. Nothing. I felt her soft hand all over my thighs. I felt her breast. Nothing. The radiation. The chemo. The cancer. They zapped all the sap out of me. Maybe you were right. Back at St. Anthony’s when you said that life sucks. Maybe you were right.”

  Pancho wanted to say something funny, to tease D.Q. somehow, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited a few minutes until he thought D.Q. was asleep. Just as he started to leave, D.Q. spoke again. “Don’t forget the perico,” he said.

  CHAPTER 29

  Out in the hall he met Juan pushing a roll-up bed. “He’s asleep,” he told him. “Leave it, I’ll set it up later.” There was a look of doubt on Juan’s face, as if he were considering the consequences of not following Helen’s precise instructions. “It’s okay,” Pancho assured him.

  “Is okay,” Juan said. They turned around and walked side by side. When they were going down the stairs, Juan asked tentatively, “Hablas español?”

  “No,” Pancho answered.

  “No?” Juan was surprised. “How can it be?”

  Pancho shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t feel like explaining to Juan that his father only spoke to him and Rosa in English. He wanted his kids to be Americans. Rosa knew more Spanish than Pancho did because she learned it by watching telenovelas.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Pancho stopped for a moment, not knowing which way to turn. Juan motioned toward the way they had first come in. Pancho remembered that he needed to call Marisol to inquire about the famous perico. “Is there a telephone I can use?”

  “Sure. There many phones. Even outside there’s phones. Let’s go outside, you be more private there. I show you around.”

  “Okay.” Outside is good, he thought. He felt like he had dropped ten points down that death scale that D.Q. talked about ever since he stepped inside the house.

  They went outside and Pancho breathed deeply. They were on a terrace overlooking the grounds. Caramelo was still circling the corral. Pancho walked to the farthest end of the terrace and looked down at the pool. Sunlight shimmered on the light blue water. Juan came and stood next to him. “Is a lot of work taking care of all this. I take care of pool, horses, garden. La Misses, she likes lots of green, but this is desert. We have well just for grass and plants. Another well for house. But underneath two wells, water comes from same place, no? How does water down there get full again? It never rains. No snow. Is not normal to try to grow plants and grass here in desert. Cactus, nopales, that’s okay.” Pancho kept staring at the surface of the pool. “The water in the pool we buy. Big truck comes every year. Come, let’s go down.”

  They stepped away from the edge of the terrace and walked toward a stone stairway next to the newly built wooden ramp. “El joven Daniel is very ill, no?”

  “Yeah.”

  “La Misses is very happy to have him here.
All last month she put in the ramp, the elevator. I painted a room in my apartment. She said you stay there. Good, I like company. But Daniel wants you to stay with him. You must be good friend to him.”

  Pancho sighed. Two weeks. That’s what he had promised D.Q. He wondered if he could make it in this place for two weeks. It wasn’t so bad outside, though. He would need to find something for his body to do. At Casa Esperanza, the endless rickshaw rides kept him tired and therefore calm. But here? He remembered the huge pile of rocks he had seen on the side of the driveway as they drove in. “What are those rocks out by the driveway for?”

  “Ahh. Those rocks.” Juan shut his eyes and rubbed the top of his head with his hand. “Those rocks are gonna kill me. La Misses wants to build a stone wall around the pool. But no truck can go back there. So they dump the rocks in front and I haul rock back there. One, two rock at a time. My back. I’m old, you know. Seventy-two.”

  “I’ll help you move the rocks.”

  “Nooo. You a guest here. You relax, keep Daniel company. You two sit by the pool or in the kiosko we built out by the pinones. Is cool out there.”

  “I need to work.”

  Juan disappeared into the space underneath the stone stairs and came out with a tattered straw hat in his hand. “For sun.” He put the hat on. They walked toward the corral, following a stone path through a garden of desert flowers.

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “The who?”

  “You know, La Misses’s husband.”

  “Ah. El Señor Stu. He works all the time. Travels. He in New York now. I’m in my apartment watching TV or asleep when he comes in. I hear his car. Even on Saturdays and Sundays he works.” Juan made a face. People working on Sundays was something he would never be able to understand. “He’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But La Misses, she wears the pants in the house.”

  “Yeah.” Pancho stopped. A bee was buzzing around his head. He stood still and watched it land on his arm. His father once told him that bees can smell when you’re angry or afraid of them and then they sting you in self-defense. If he concentrated on the spot where the bee was, Pancho could feel the touch of its tiny legs walking calmly on his arm. He realized that he did not feel any anger. He had always imagined that he would confront Robert Lewis out of anger or with anger. Where had the anger gone? It had disappeared, but the decision to make Robert Lewis accountable for his sister’s death had not. That decision was still there. Pancho could feel it, solid, inevitable.

  Juan put his finger on Pancho’s arm in the path of the bee. The bee climbed up onto Juan’s finger. Juan brought the finger close to his mouth and blew on it. The bee flew away. “You not afraid of bees,” Juan said, as if discovering something about Pancho.

  “You neither,” Pancho responded. His father used to blow bees away from his finger just like Juan.

  “They still sting me. When I cut flowers, they mad. They think all flowers are theirs.” This time when he laughed, Pancho noticed that he had a tooth missing.

  At the end of the stone path and the garden with the wildflowers was another path that led to the corral. The corral was farther away from the house than it first appeared. They climbed onto the first rung of the fence. Juan clucked his tongue at Caramelo. The horse snorted and shook his head. “He’s testaduro, that horse,” Juan complained. “How you say testaduro?”

  “Stubborn.”

  “So you understand Spanish, but you don’t speak it.” Juan took a cube of sugar out of his pocket. The horse sniffed the air, moved toward them, and then jumped away.

  “He’s wild.”

  “He’s young. They wild when they young. Like you.” He smiled as if he knew something. “You can help me train him.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Tomorrow I show you.”

  “I’m not much of a rider.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be a long time before we ride him. Tomorrow and for many days, we throw a rope around his neck and we let him run like that with the rope until he gets used to you. Then you begin guide with the rope. You get closer. Like that, little by little.”

  “How long does it all take?”

  “A few weeks. There’s no hurry. A little each day.”

  “We’re only gonna be here two weeks.”

  “Two weeks? Dos?” Juan seemed confused.

  “La Misses didn’t tell you?” There was some sarcasm in Pancho’s voice.

  “No. She say you here to stay.”

  Pancho jumped down from the wooden fence of the corral. “I better go make a phone call.”

  “We go to my place. I show you.” Juan stepped down slowly, holding on to Pancho’s shoulder. They walked back. “Why you want leave here for? This is nice easy place to live. You and Daniel live here.”

  Pancho looked at the house. It looked like a palace in the distance. A Spanish palace in the desert. Why would D.Q. not want to live here? It’s not a good place to die, he remembered D.Q. saying. Despite the pool and the grass and the plants that Helen had forced out of the ground, the place was still a desert, dry, desolate. Not that Las Cruces was much different. And yet there was something about this house that seemed dark and closophobic, like Josie used to say. The horse back there knew it. He was going crazy running around and around, trying to find a way out.

  “You like it here?” he asked Juan.

  The question caught him by surprise. “Eh? Me like it? Is a good place for an old man. I have daughter in L.A. Five grandchildren. I go see her for Christmas. I spend my whole life in city working in rich people gardens. In L.A. for twenty years. My wife, Sara, and I come to Albuquerque fifteen years ago, then she die. Three years ago, I come work here. Is okay. Someday soon I take all I save and go back to L.A. I build little room in back of my daughter’s house. She and grandchildren take care of me when I’m old.” He grinned. “More old.”

  The entrance to the apartment was up a green wooden staircase in back of the garage. Juan held the door open for Pancho. “Micasa,” Juan said. Inside was one big room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. The stove, sink, and refrigerator stood at one end. There was a round table with three chairs by the windows that faced onto the driveway and the air conditioner that Pancho saw when he arrived. A sofa and a recliner sat by the windows that faced the corral. “I show you phone.” Pancho followed Juan into a narrow hallway where there were three doors. “The bathroom,” Juan said, knocking on the first door. He knocked on the second door. “My room.” When he got to the last door, he opened it and said, “This was going to be your room.”

  He moved out of the way so Pancho could step in. It was a small room with a single bed, a bureau with a television sitting on it, a desk with a chair and a telephone, a bureau with a mirror on top, and a bedside table with a lamp. For once Helen was right, Pancho thought. He would be more comfortable here.

  “I leave you.” Juan closed the door.

  He stretched himself out on the bed and closed his eyes. He wondered what he used to think about before Rosa died. He didn’t think he thought about anything when he was alone. This thinking about things that he had never thought about before started recently—first with imagining and planning how he was going to kill Robert Lewis, but it soon went beyond that. D.Q. and all his happenings, Marisol and the new feelings that she brought, even the Death Warrior stuff occupied his mind. Thoughts came to him out of nowhere. He needed to get in the ring with a better fighter, someone who could knock him out and stop the thinking.

  He imagined now that D.Q. somehow accepted the fact that he would be better off staying with his mother. He would get over whatever happened with Marisol and Helen would hire her as D.Q.’s nurse. She would come over every day and Pancho would get to see her. He would not tell her how he felt about her, but she would know somehow. They owed it to D.Q. not to be open about their feelings. Helen would give him a job as Juan’s helper, and eventually he’d move out here and this would be his room. Then what? He hesitated about going
any further. D.Q. dies or doesn’t die? Which direction should his imaginings go? D.Q. dies. Pancho stays on as Juan’s helper. Juan eventually goes to live with his daughter in L.A. Pancho finishes high school. There must be a high school somewhere around here. He’d have to buy a car. What did Juan use for a car? He starts going out with Marisol. What would he do to make a living? This was an area of his life that he never thought about. He would work in construction as a carpenter. Would Marisol be okay with that? Maybe he would take over Juan’s job. Helen would always need a caretaker. And Marisol, they could move into the apartment. She’d drive to town to work. But if you were Marisol, would you want to live over a garage? And when the kids came, there wouldn’t be any room for them.

  Or D.Q. doesn’t die. Johnny Corazon gives him an herb that makes him better. What happens then with Marisol? He’d have to go away. He’d move someplace else so D.Q. would have a chance with Marisol. He couldn’t do that to D.Q. Why? Since when did he start caring?

  He opened his eyes and focused on the light fixture on the ceiling. He could see dead moths in the bottom. His Rosa. He must not forget about her. Robert Lewis. The only thing about the future he needed to concern himself with, the only imagining he needed to have, was the road that led to Robert Lewis.

  The telephone was on the desk. He got up, sat at the desk chair, and took out a piece of paper from his wallet. He dialed. He heard the ring on the other side.

  “Hello?”

  “Marisol?”

  “Pancho, is that you? What a nice surprise. Where are you?”

  “We’re at D.Q.’s. At his mother’s.”

  “How is it? Is it nice?”

  “It’s fancy.”

  “How’s D.Q. doing?”

  “He’s worse. He doesn’t look good. He got worse overnight.”

  “Oh.” He could hear her breath, shallow and rapid. “It happens sometimes. All of a sudden, there can be a shift. It may be temporary. He could bounce back.”

  “He’s worried about his wooden parrot. He says he left it in his bed, mixed up with the sheets.”