Mexican WhiteBoy

by Matt De La Peña

  “It’s okay,” Uno says. “Come on, no more talkin’.”

  He tells Chico to keep the shirt pressed against his brother’s nose and then rushes Danny, shoves him with both hands. “The fuck you doin’, man? Why you throw the bat at my little bro?”

  Danny backs up a couple steps, surprised.

  Sofia pushes in between them and starts screaming for Uno to step off. “It was an accident, Uno! You think he did it on purpose?”

  Uno shoves Sofia out of the way and gets in Danny’s face again, pokes a finger into his forehead. “Answer me, bitch! Why you throw the bat?”

  Danny backpedals, puts his hands up and says: “I didn’t mean to.” But his voice comes out too weak to be understood. He looks over at Manuel, lying limp in Chico’s lap, then back at Uno. I’m sorry.

  “Nah, you gonna tell me about it. You messed up my little bro’s face.”

  Sofia pleads with Uno, fights to get between them.

  “Talk, bitch!” Uno shouts, and he shoves Danny again. “Say somethin’!”

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  “Talk, bitch! Why you throw the bat at my little bro?”

  Danny glances at the guys watching from behind Uno. He’s about to say he’s sorry again, louder this time, so he’ll be heard, but it’s too late. Uno’s already gritting his teeth. Uno’s already stepping forward with all his weight, delivering an overhead right that smashes flush into Danny’s face. Snaps his head back. Buckles his knees.

  6

  Danny hits the pavement in a flurry of blackness, the back of his head whiplashing against a patch of dirt next to the crumbling curb, making an awful cracking sound. Like a bat smacking a baseball. A lightning flash goes off in his head.

  Raul and Chico rush Uno, hold him back.

  Sofia screams him down in Spanish at the top of her lungs.

  Kids around the cul-de-sac rush the scene to get a better look at what’s happening.

  Carmen holds Sofia away from Uno. But Sofia kicks and elbows her way out of Carmen’s grasp. She runs at Uno, throws a wild open hand, which Uno catches. Raul pulls Sofia away as she screams: “Hit my cousin, pinche puto! I’ll kill you!”

  Uno shouts back, “Look at my brother, Sofe! He’s bleedin’ all over the place!”

  Danny’s vaguely aware of the commotion building around him. He knows he’s been hit. Punched. Saw the fist just before it landed. Knows he fell, that a mound of dirt caught the back of his head like a stiff mitt. Knows there was a loud crashing sound in his brain. But he doesn’t know if he’s hurt yet. Doesn’t know if he’s awake. He hears people above him. Sees their images. Muddled voices and shadows moving around above. The packed dirt under the back of his head. The warm liquid running down his neck. Sweat? Blood? Running into his mouth. Salty. Smell of copper. Pooling under his matted hair. Staining the cul-de-sac.

  Somebody is lifting his head off the sidewalk, setting it on a towel. A girl’s hand. Nail polish. Red. He doesn’t look up to see whose face it is. Just stares at her red fingernails. So red. Shiny.

  He concentrates on his breathing, the air going in and out of his lungs. Then he closes his eyes so he can rest a second.

  Dear Dad:

  I keep thinking about the last time you and me walked home from the Digueño baseball field. I was even skinnier back then, my ribs sticking out all over.

  Mom was gone that week, but nobody ever said where she went or why. She was just gone, and you were watching us.

  We were walking together and you told me, “I did somethin’ crazy, boy. And some shit’s gonna change ’cause of it. Soon. I just wanted you to hear it from me first, all right?” I nodded, trying to think what was up. It was the most you’d ever said to me at one time. And then two weeks later you were gone.

  Lately I’ve been playing your words back. Over and over, in my head. I’ve been analyzing not only what you said but how you said it. Trying to figure out what you meant that day. And I think I finally got it. You were talking about me!

  At the time I was too dumb to get it. I was more concentrating on the strides you were taking. I was trying to make mine long enough so that the shadow of my steps matched up with the shadow of yours. But now I’m older.

  I remember then you stopped cold and pointed to the sky. You’d spotted a hawk gliding overhead. Your favorite thing in the world. Instead of looking at the hawk, though, I stared at your face. The leathery brown skin. The stubble on your chin. Your strong cheekbones and dark eyes. Mom always said you had a face like an Indian. I was thinking in my head: Do I have a face like an Indian, too? When I grow up will my face look like my dad’s? Will my skin get dark like his if I stay in the sun all day?

  7

  Danny pops open his eyes, looks into the sky, but instead of finding the hawk he finds the face of a girl. His girl. The one with the lighter skin. Her eyes locked on him. And she seems so concerned. Her shiny hair falling toward his face.

  And her mouth is moving. He can’t make out what she’s saying because she’s clearly speaking Spanish. But he realizes she’s even prettier up close. She’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. At any of his schools. In any of his towns. Her eyes so big and brown, almost like a cartoon, but in a good way. Her face so perfect. It makes him feel something in his chest again.

  She looks away for a second, at somebody else, and then comes back to him.

  Suddenly he’s aware of the pain in his jaw, the scary numbness at the back of his head. And the girl looks genuinely worried. About him. For some reason her worry makes the back of his head hurt less.

  He tries to smile. So she’ll know he’s okay. He’s gonna be fine. But instead he closes his eyes again….

  Finally I looked at the sky, too, that day. Like you. And we watched the giant black bird soar over a pack of thick trees and back again. Measuring the sky with its wings.

  But I have something I wanna tell you, Dad. I know why you said that to me now. About how things were gonna change. You were telling me you were going to Mexico. You were sick of living in a city with so many white people, with a white wife, with two kids who were half white. You wanted to be around more Mexicans. Your real family. But what I wanted to tell you, Dad, is how much I’ve changed since that day. How much better I am. How much stronger and darker and more Mexican I am. Matter of fact, just today I knocked some kid out. A big black dude who was trying to mess with Sofia. I pushed him and yelled at him in Spanish and then I punched him right in the face, Dad. You should have seen how fast this kid fell to the asphalt. And then I just stood over him, waiting to see if he’d try to get up.

  I wish you knew that about me back then. I wish I would have told you. But at the time I didn’t know you were leaving. So I just stood there with you. Both of us watching that hawk. And when it finally dove behind the pack of trees and was lost, you lowered your head and continued walking.

  And I followed you.

  Spaghetti with Meatballs

  1

  “A leopard can’t never change his spots,” Senior says, stopping Uno from crossing against the light by snatching an elbow. He fingers the crosswalk button with his free hand, shaking his head. “That shit’s real, son. Trust me. A leopard’s spots come from nature, and nature’s unnegotiable.” He lets go of Uno’s elbow and subtly crosses himself with a forefinger, points to the clouds.

  Uno nods at his old man, looks both ways—not a single car in sight.

  He slips off his baseball mitt and tucks it under his arm, wipes an ashy hand across his face. As his old man goes on a little more about leopards he glances down at a broken forty bottle lying at the mouth of the gutter, right under his kicks. Wonders how much alcohol must be flowing through National City’s gutters after an average Friday night. Probably enough to give them guppies swimming around down there a nice little buzz.

  Ever since Uno can remember, the first Saturday of every month his biological father has driven down from Oxnard to pay him a visit. Senior has a whole new family now—a
pretty black wife and a brand-new baby boy—but the guy still makes an effort to see his firstborn.

  Senior will pull up in his old-school Chevy Impala at around noon, crank the parking brake across the street and tap his horn. To avoid dealing with his moms, Uno will hop through his bedroom window, and the two of them’ll walk the eight blocks to Tony’s Barbecue on Honeysuckle Street. They’ll grab a table in back, eat a plate of hot wings and a couple po’ boys and “discuss” Uno’s self-image.

  But this week’s discussion is going down a different road. Since they last saw each other, Uno’s been in trouble twice. First he got questioned by the cops for the incident with Sofia’s cousin at the derby. Whole thing turned into a big mess, and he regrets it. Luckily, the kid didn’t press any charges, so nothing happened. But then a week later he gave some frat dude a beat-down outside the Horton Plaza Mall. Gave him a nasty gash under his left eye, dislocated his jaw. A couple security guards caught the tail end of the altercation, rushed the scene and contained them both until the cops showed. When Uno wouldn’t fully cooperate with the cops’ tired line of questioning they cuffed his ass, shoved him in the back of the squad car and took him to the station, where he had to stay overnight.

  Uno’s mom and stepdad didn’t show up until the next morning. Before he saw them, he overheard his moms asking one of the cops at the front desk, “Lemme ask you this, officer: what happens if I refuse to take my son back?”

  2

  The walk sign lights green and Uno and his old man cross together. After a few rare seconds of quiet, Senior gives Uno a little whack to the back of his dome. “Why you lookin’ at your glove for, boy? You should be lookin’ in my eyes. The answers isn’t in some game, they in the pupils of men who seek the path to wisdom. Men who learned how to accept they spots, learned how to make the best of ’em, learned to love ’em.”

  “I am lookin’ in your eyes, Pop,” Uno says, rubbing the back of his head.

  “Man is his own best doctor,” Senior says as they continue down the block, side by side. Uno’s every bit as tall these days, but his skin is still a couple shades lighter—the Mexican brown of his mom’s side diluting some of Senior’s shiny black. “They got mad drugs now, right? Ritalin, Vicodin, Zoloft. A kid gots some extra energy these days and they wanna pump his little ass full of chemicals. But lemme ask you this, Uno: Who benefits more from all these prescriptions? The patient or the doctor? Is they tryin’ to help this little youngster? Or control his ass? It’s a simple conflict of interest we talkin’ ’bout.”

  Senior taps at his right temple twice with two fingers, raises an eyebrow at his son. “A wise man don’t just consider the shit he sees, Uno, he considers what’s behind the shit he sees.”

  Senior’s a distinguished-looking, reformed-gangster type. Always shows up to see Uno looking polished: a perfectly pressed button-down tucked into a pair of Dickies, clean Timberlands. Keeps his salt-and-pepper crop cut close to the scalp, his silver sideburns and goatee meticulously sculpted. Only things disorderly about the man these days are the thick tattoo running across the front of his neck (NANA RIP) and the long, jagged scar running from his chin to his upper ear.

  Uno’s mom claims the cheek scar is the work of Senior’s own father, Senior senior. According to the story she tells, pre-Jesus, Senior was the biggest black gangster in San Diego: “Get a hold of that man’s rap sheet if you want the truth, Uno. Got more pages than any of them books he claims he reads: selling drugs, shooting up liquor stores, jacking cars, burglaries, even tried to rob his own father one time. Bastard was in prison the day you took your first breath, Uno. You remember that next time tu papa comes breezing down here talkin’ like he on some kind of moral high horse. Nuh-uh, mijo, he don’t fool me. I know what’s in that son of a bitch’s heart.”

  When Uno and Senior reach Senior’s old Impala, they settle onto the curb next to one another. Senior lists a few more drugs abused by doctors, but Uno’s attention drifts elsewhere. He steals a quick glance at his old man’s profile. Follows the path of the scar, top to bottom, then looks away. As a kid he used to have this crazy recurring dream: Some blur of a hooded black man was chasing him through a dark cemetery. No matter what kind of moves Uno put on or how fast he ran, the guy would always be gaining on him. Finally he’d leap at Uno’s feet like a football player, drag him down by his ankles. Pinned to the ground, Uno would look up at where the guy’s face should have been, but there was no face. There was only this huge scar, shaped just like Senior’s, floating around inside an otherwise empty hood. At that point Uno would let out a punk-ass scream and wake up.

  3

  Senior reaches into Uno’s glove and pulls out the beat-up baseball. He spins the seams around in his fingers for a sec and then studies the scuffed-up label. “I’ll tell you who makes out on them drugs, boy,” he says. “The American aristocrat. You ever heard that word, Uno? Aristocrat?”

  “Nah, Pop.”

  “Means rich people. White folks livin’ in them big-ass houses you see in places like La Jolla. Folks who don’t care nothin’ for nobody with a little color to they skin. See, I been doin’ a grip of reading, boy. I got all kinda bookshelves in my house. Filled to the capacity with books. A wise man always surrounds hisself with the right type of biographies.”

  Uno nods. A fly lands on his knee, but he manages to chase it off without his old man thinking he’s not paying attention.

  “Now, I used to go down the same lonely and loveless road you travelin’,” Senior says, taking Uno’s chin in his hand. Forcing eye contact. “When I was seventeen like you I used to throw down, take people’s shit. Used to smoke anything I could roll up in a Zig-Zag. But I didn’t love nobody. I didn’t love myself.”

  “I hear ya, Pop,” Uno says, looking into his old man’s cloudy eyes.

  “Now I work a hard, honest day’s work. People come to me and say, ‘Senior, why you don’t never use none of your sick days or vacation days?’ I tell ’em, ‘Because I found myself in my work. In being a provider. In being a responsible human being.’” Senior releases Uno’s chin, flips back his baseball.

  Uno slips the ball into his mitt, nodding. Sets his mitt in his lap.

  “I know how hard it is, son. You see yourself in them thugs you roll with. You find acceptance. Reinforcement. I been there and back, two times. But answer me this question: you roll with suckers, play sucker games, come up with sucker schemes—what that makes you, boy?”

  Uno shrugs.

  “Makes you a sucker, motherfucker!”

  Senior’s deep, raspy laugh sounds just like his old Chevy engine turning over.

  Uno laughs a little, too, but inside he’s trying to figure out what his old man’s talking about. Sometimes he wonders if he has a learning disability or something. He knows Senior’s dropping mad knowledge, but he can’t ever seem to scoop it up, make it stick to his brain.

  Uno slips on his mitt again, pulls out his baseball and tosses it back in. He glances across the street. Still no sign of his moms. A group of Mexican kids walk past the house, one of them taps the mailbox. The kid glances at Uno, gives him a what’s-up with his head. Uno recognizes the dude from the neighborhood, nods back.

  4

  “What up with Manny?” Senior says. “You lookin’ out for your little bro like I told you?”

  “Course I am, Pop,” Uno says. “Moms and Ernesto got him stayin’ in some halfway house for retarded kids, but I visit him. He took one on the nose at the derby couple weeks back. He all right, though.”

  Senior scoffs, shakes his head. “They put little man away, huh? Bad business.” He leans forward, says: “I want you to look at me, boy. I want you to look right in these two eyes I got.”

  Uno sits up a little straighter. He hooks his arms around his knees and tries to look even deeper into his pop’s eyes than he already was. How can he show Senior he’s looking even deeper?

  “I love you, son.”

  Uno cuts away from his old man’s eyes. He pulls t
he ball from his mitt and tosses it back in, mumbles: “Me too, Pop.”

  Senior snatches his boy by the chin again, forces eye contact. “You heard what I just told you, boy? I love you!” He pauses a few seconds, adds: “Just like I love Jesus! He felt powerless, too, you know. Like you and me. When he took the most messed-up suckers and died for them, he died for us!”

  Uno tries to nod, but his old man’s got a pretty tight grip on his chin. The most he can manage is a little facial vibration in his dad’s callused hand.

  “It’s on you, boy. You already know the answers—look at your pop, Uno! You can’t give in to them feelings that say you ain’t good enough. That you ain’t mean just as much as the American aristocrat. It takes a murderer to be isolated from the rest of society to understand what wrong he done.”

  Uno swallows, tries to nod.

  “You wanna evolve, son? Or you wanna stay the same? It’s on you, man. I could serve you spaghetti every night, right? Seven days a week, plain old tired spaghetti. But say one night I throw some meatballs in the mix. That’s a change, son…. That change is in you!”

  Uno tries to nod.

  “That change is God.”

  Uno clears his throat. He starts to say something, but Senior’s not done.

  “A man cannot run away from the first light of dawn for forever, son. You fake it till you make it, know what I’m sayin’?”

  When Senior lets go of his chin Uno nods.

  Senior picks up a rock and tosses it down the road. “I want you to come live with me, Uno. Already talked with my wife and my baby. We extending that invitation to you as a family. You pull together five, six hundred bones over the summer, like a deposit, a show of good faith, and you can come live with your old man. See, I believe in you, Uno. And I’ll always be here for you.”

  Uno feels something tighten in his chest, his throat. He sticks the baseball in his mitt, pulls his hand out and scratches the side of his shaved head.