Last Summer of the Death Warriors

by Francesco X Stork

  He should have known that a girl like her would not have any problems hiking down a steep rock and talking at the same time. “No way she’s going to let him go back.”

  “Don’t go so fast. If I fall, I want to have you close enough to take you with me.”

  He stopped. She put her two hands on his back to keep herself from sliding. They inched their way down like that until Pancho reached the spot he would have chosen to chisel something into the rock. He looked up the smooth, black surface and there it was. Marisol stood beside him and looked up as well.

  “What the heck is that?” Pancho said. He was expecting to see a buffalo or a tepee, but instead he saw a design that might have come out of his sophomore-year geometry class.

  “It looks like a kite. There’s the head and that line there could be the tail and that line there could be the string.”

  Pancho looked at Marisol like maybe she wasn’t as smart as he thought she was. “I never heard of Indians flying kites,” he said.

  “Not now. But the Indians originally came from the East, across the Bering Strait into Alaska, and they’ve had kites in the East for a long, long time. The Chinese invented them.”

  Pancho reconsidered. Maybe she was as smart as he thought she was. No wonder she and D.Q. never ran out of things to talk about. She sat down on a rock.

  “Sit for a second,” she said. “You need to tell me what’s bothering you.”

  He sat down next to her and then spoke haltingly. “When I talked to you on the phone last week, you said that you and D.Q. had talked about the difference between friendship and love.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what’s the difference? Is it something you think I would understand?”

  She poked his shoulder with her arm. “Stop it. You’re not as dumb as you make yourself out to be.” She reflected for a few moments. “Friendship is when you share a common interest with someone, something that brings you together. Love is when you are interested in each other. You want to do things with each other.”

  “With each other?” He couldn’t help the grin. “What kind of things?”

  She laughed. “Those that you’re thinking just now, but not just those. Like looking at petroglyphs. When I was walking here, I was excited that we would be looking at them together, with each other. You’re part of why I wanted to look at the petroglyphs, because I wanted to see them through your eyes.”

  “You sound like D.Q. now,” he said, teasing her. But he understood.

  “What are you all going to do if his mother doesn’t let him go back?”

  “Nothing. What can we do?”

  “He’s not doing well.” She looked at Pancho. He looked away from her uncomfortably. Was she telling him that it was up to him and only him to help D.Q.?

  “He needs you now more than ever,” she continued.

  “I’m here.”

  “Maybe here is not where you should be.”

  He made a gesture with his hands. What can I do?

  She took a deep breath and then spoke in a different, lighter tone. “Remember that guy Sal that was interviewing for a job at la Casa?”

  “The pendejo.”

  “That one. Well, thanks to you, he didn’t get the job. But Laurie still plans to have a college student live at la Casa. D.Q. reminded me—you should apply. Not for this year, obviously, but for next year. After you finish high school. You can go to UNM or maybe even the community college that’s nearby. I know you’re good with your hands. There are plenty of things you can study that I bet you’d enjoy. Laurie likes you, as you know.” She smiled. “And I may put in a good word for you.”

  Pancho grabbed his head. College? The notion was beyond funny, beyond ridiculous, it was downright sad. He shook his head. He couldn’t believe that she could even think he could ever go to college. “D.Q. asked you to mention that to me.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Why not get him for the job? Where’s he gonna be?”

  She bit her lower lip softly. “Whatever happens to him, he thinks this would be something good for you.”

  She raised herself from the rock she was sitting on and extended her hand to help Pancho up. He took it. She held his hand, looked for the other, and found it. She rested her eyes comfortably in his. “D.Q. wants you to have something to hope for. That’s his gift to you.” She reached up and kissed him on the lips. It was a small kiss. It lasted only two or three seconds, just long enough for him to taste the future.

  CHAPTER 33

  Juan was standing by his apartment, getting ready to leave. Pancho lifted D.Q. onto the motorized wheelchair and went to the kitchen to grab his backpack. He came out and walked slowly toward D.Q. and Marisol.

  He said to Marisol, “I told Juan I’d go into town with him to see a friend of his. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  She looked at him like she didn’t believe a single word, but she only reached out and pulled him to her. He hesitated before putting his arms around her. “My aunt and my cousin Aurora, the one who is a nurse, remember?”

  He nodded.

  “They live in Ganutillo, on the western outskirts of El Paso. It’s very close to Las Cruces. I wouldn’t mind spending some time with them.” She smiled at Pancho and let him go.

  D.Q. motioned Pancho to bend down so he could whisper in his ear. “Be a Death Warrior,” he said.

  When they were inside the truck, and Juan was about to turn the ignition key, he asked, “You sure you want to go?” He tilted his head forward to peer into Pancho’s reddened eyes.

  “Let’s go. Now.” It was an order.

  Juan and Pancho drove to Rafael’s house in silence. Pancho opened his window and let the cool air hit his face. What he wanted to do was remember his sister, recollect the words in her diary, but his mind kept returning to that one kiss by the petroglyph.

  Be a Death Warrior, D.Q. had whispered in his ear. Why would not killing Robert Lewis be something a Death Warrior would do…or not do? It was all so confusing. A Death Warrior who does not kill, who loves life. Two kids in love with one girl and they’re okay with it. Would he be okay with D.Q. loving Marisol if D.Q. weren’t dying? If he looked like the D.Q. in his mother’s painting? He felt like a fighter who had been knocked out but managed to stand up before the end of the eight count, covering his face with his gloves to avoid the punches from an opponent who smells blood.

  Rafael’s house was a one-room adobe shack on the edge of a neighborhood of one-room adobe shacks. A man who looked older and frailer than Juan was sitting on a wooden chair in front. He had a beer can in his hand and a red cooler next to his chair. Behind the chair, on a window ledge, a transistor radio played Mexican music. Rafael opened the cooler and took out a beer as soon as he saw Juan. Then he saw Pancho and he took out another beer. “Come say hello to Rafael,” Juan told Pancho.

  “I gotta get going.”

  “I see you, then.” Juan deposited the keys in Pancho’s hand and held Pancho’s hand as he did so. Pancho interpreted the gesture as a request to be careful.

  He spread the map of Albuquerque out next to him and he drove off, following the route he had marked in red. He drove slowly and cautiously, staying to the right wherever there was more than one lane. The truck had more power than his father’s truck. After his father died, he drove the truck only for errands, to the grocery store or to work or to take Rosa to the Green Café. He couldn’t afford to be caught driving without a license. When he drove the truck then, he felt responsible. He felt like a man carrying the burdens placed on him early on by life and doing a good job of it. Except that when Rosa died, all of that proved to be just a show, him fooling himself.

  It would have been hard to drive and look at the map at the same time had he not taken the time to memorize the route. He parked the truck as soon as he turned onto Handel Road. If he were to rank the houses he had been to in Albuquerque from the fanciest to the crappiest, Helen’s house would be way up there, then these houses on Handel
Road, then there would be a kind of long jump down to Marisol’s house, another jump to Johnny Corazon’s, and a leap straight down to Rafael’s. Casa Esperanza he would put in a category by itself. It was a beautiful place, almost as beautiful as his trailer back home.

  He walked with his backpack over his shoulder on the side of the street opposite where he expected Robert Lewis’s house to be. The first thing he saw was the truck that Julieta had described, bright red with the words Jensen and Sons painted on it in sharp white letters. It was parked in a driveway in front of a two-car garage. Robert Lewis’s house was a white brick house with white pebbles in the front yard. Rosebushes lined the walk leading to the oak front door. Across the street from the house, there was a baseball field where a softball game was taking place. Pancho went to the aluminum bleachers and sat on the lowest rung. The kids who were playing were eight or nine. One team was wearing black-and-gold uniforms and was called the Pirates; the other team, in blue and white, was called the Cubs. The parents on the bleachers were women, mostly talking amongst themselves. The fathers, or the men that Pancho took to be the fathers, leaned on the chain-link fence that ran between home and third, shouting instructions to the players.

  He watched the game. Every once in a while he would look sideways at Robert Lewis’s house. A stone wall about five feet high ran down the side of the yard and around the backyard. On the far side of the house, there was an empty lot where a house was being constructed. In a couple of hours, when it got dark, he would enter the lot and climb the stone wall in the back.

  He was thinking about how to proceed when he saw one of the garage doors open. A small green car backed out to the middle of the driveway and stopped. Pancho unconsciously stood up. The car was driven by a woman with curly white hair. The trunk of the car popped open. Then out of the garage came a girl about twelve years old. She was dressed in some kind of uniform, blue shorts and a shirt with a number in front. She was holding a net bag full of soccer balls. She lifted the lid of the trunk and threw the balls inside, then slammed the trunk shut and got in the passenger side of the car. The car backed up a few yards and stopped. The driver honked a few times. Pancho’s heart sped up when he saw a shirtless, baldish-looking man in shorts and sandals emerge from the garage. The man’s stomach jiggled as he walked to the driver’s window. He stood there scratching his arms as if the air were full of fleas, then he blew kisses to the driver and to the girl and watched the car back into the street and drive away. As he stood in the driveway, he turned his head slowly in the direction of the bleachers. It was too far for him to see the fixed and fearless stare in Pancho’s eyes, but maybe he could feel it. Robert Lewis hurried back inside, and a few seconds later the garage door clanged shut.

  All along, although he had no reason to do so, Pancho had imagined Robert Lewis’s kids, if he had any, to be older. It never occurred to him that the man could have a daughter that age living with him. Maybe she was his granddaughter. The fathers along the fence shouted. One of the baseball players was taking off from second to third. What did it matter to him how old she was? He picked up his backpack and started to walk toward the empty lot. He didn’t need to wait for darkness to come.

  He entered the construction lot and walked to the back. He peered over the stone wall toward Robert Lewis’s house. There was no one in the backyard. He saw a trampoline and a blue aboveground tin pool covered with a green tarp. There was an open porch with patio furniture and sliding glass doors. Two windows stared out from the back of the house, a small one that he took to be the kitchen window and a larger one that he figured belonged to a bedroom. He could see curtains across the sliding glass doors. There was no sign of a dog. He dropped the backpack into the yard and then lifted himself over the stone wall. Once inside the yard, he crouched by his backpack and took out the black revolver. He stood up and tucked it in the back of his pants.

  He approached the house slowly, walking as close as he could to the side wall. Everywhere there was evidence that the girl lived there. Diet Coke cans were strewn about a circle of chairs by the pool; a rusty girl’s bike leaned against an aluminum toolshed; an abandoned pretend stove collected bird droppings. When he reached the end of the stone wall, he walked over to the larger of the two windows. The curtains were parted far enough for him to see inside the girl’s room. There were posters on the wall of a blond singer he had never heard of before, a bottle of black or purple nail polish on the dresser next to the bed. On a shelf built into the wall stood the same dolls that Rosa collected. He noticed the Mexican doll, the Dutch doll with the wooden shoes, and the Danish doll with the long blond braid.

  He sat down on the grass, his back against the wall of the house, his feet almost touching the aboveground pool. From inside the house he could hear the faint noise of the television. It sounded like a soccer game, an excited male voice followed by cheering. Here he was, a minute or two from killing Robert Lewis. He had planned for this. It was the hope and strength that fed him since Rosa died. It was his anger, only the anger had gone. He remembered standing at the entrance to St. Anthony’s and feeling someone looking at him, the pecan falling on his head out by the hammock.

  There was no need to hurry. Soccer games lasted a couple of hours. If he could, he would drag the body out to the yard. It bothered him that the girl might walk into the house and see something she would never forget. He held out his hand to see if he was losing his nerve, but his hand was calm. There was no fear and there was no doubt. There was no anger. What was in there, then? Was it a cowardly softness? No, that wasn’t it. Whatever was in there was tender all right, but it wasn’t cowardly.

  The memory of cutting the braid of Rosa’s Danish doll came to him. He couldn’t remember what had prompted him to cut the doll’s hair, nor why he had chosen the Danish doll; there were other dolls with long hair. He had used the scissors from the bathroom drawer. Rosa entered her room just as he snipped through the braid. Her face turned dark red as if she were about to explode. She yanked the doll from him and raised it in the air as if to hit him, but then she stopped. “Get out, Pancho!” she yelled.

  He went into his room, remorseful. He thought for sure that Rosa would not forgive this prank as she had all the others. But an hour later, she came into his room with the Danish doll. “Pancho, look what I done.” She held up the doll for him to see. She had taken the scissors and fashioned a new hairstyle for the doll—short and neatly trimmed. “Don’t she look beautiful,” she said.

  He stood and walked to the edge of the sliding glass doors. Slowly, he stepped into the opening between the curtains. He put his forehead against the glass and covered his eyes against the glare. Robert Lewis was lying in a recliner, his back to him. His head had tilted to one side, as if he had fallen asleep watching the television in front of him. On the floor next to him was an empty bowl and a can of beer. Pancho reached out for the handle of the sliding door and pulled the door toward him very gently. It slid with only the smallest of screeches. Robert Lewis oiled his sliding doors well. He pulled the door a little more and now there was an opening large enough for him to step through. Robert Lewis did not move.

  Pancho backed away from the sliding door and returned to his place under the girl’s window. He sat down again and pulled Rosa’s diary out of the backpack. Then he took a ballpoint pen from the front pocket of the backpack, skipped to the end of the diary, and wrote. He wrote slowly, licking the point of the pen now and then as if it were a pencil. He filled three pages of the diary with a handwriting he recognized as similar to his sister’s. When he finished writing, he put the diary back in the backpack, stood up, and went into the house through the opening in the sliding doors.

  Robert Lewis let out an animal-like snort when he woke up. “What the…” he said when he saw Pancho sitting in front of him with a revolver three feet from his face.

  “This is what I want to know. Did you give Rosa Sanchez alcohol the night she died?”

  Robert Lewis’s Adam’s apple bobbled up an
d down in his throat. “You’re her brother.”

  “Good,” Pancho said. “If you asked who Rosa Sanchez was or if you said you didn’t know her, I was going to pull the trigger.”

  “You don’t wanna do that,” Robert Lewis said slowly.

  “If I think you’re telling me the truth, maybe I won’t. If you tell me a lie, you die. Did you give my sister alcohol or beer the night she died?”

  Robert Lewis dropped his head on his chest. He spoke with his head still down. “Yes.”

  “Did she tell you she was allergic?”

  There was a grin on Robert Lewis’s face when he spoke again. “Only about a hundred times.”

  Pancho waited. Robert Lewis’s right eye began to twitch. He pressed down on the twitching nerve with his finger.

  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t believe her,” he said. “I didn’t do it on purpose, honest.” He sounded like a child. His mouth moved as if he were going to start crying.

  “Why?”

  “We were having a party. What’s a party without drinking?”

  Pancho pulled the trigger. There was an explosion and the glass of the sliding door shattered. Robert Lewis covered his ears with his hands. He opened his eyes, looking surprised he was still alive.

  “Okay. I…your sister was not…She was very conservative despite her…She was innocent, you know. I thought the alcohol would make her more receptive to what I had in mind.” He was gripping the arms of the recliner. “That’s the sorry truth, I swear. I didn’t think she’d die. If I had meant to kill her, I would have hidden the body or something. When I couldn’t wake her up, I got out of there. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to kill her.”

  “You left her there.”

  “Oh, shit. Don’t you think I know it? Don’t ruin your life by killing me, son.”

  “Get up.”

  Robert Lewis rocked the recliner to a sitting position and used both of his hands to lift himself up. “Where we going?”