Last Christmas on the TV news there was a story about a family from El Monte that got killed in a car crash. I remember me and Little went with Big and Cruz in Big’s dad’s car to see where the wreck happened at the corner of Valley and Peck Road. Me and Little went along for the ride, but Cruz and Big really wanted to see the spot for theirselves. It’s like they had to see the flowers and the skid marks and the busted light pole to make the story real.
That’s how it seemed to me standing in line. I guess kids heard about me—thanks to Cruz’ big mouth—and now they needed to see the murderer for themselves. I looked down at the ground until the bell rang again and the parade music sent us to our classroom.
When my class was all inside, Capone started us on our morning prayer. When we finished, she said, “Children, Manuel is in class today. Let’s welcome him back.” Everybody turned to look at me. My face had cooled off from outside, but I could feel it getting hot again. I wondered if Capone knew what all the kids thought they knew. Then I got my answer.
“Manuel, your classmates and my sisters are praying for you and your family.” She knew. “I know it’s hard, but offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory. Class, let’s all say a Hail Mary for Manuel.” Everybody said the prayer staring at me, then Capone walked to her desk and sat down and said, “Now we all need to concentrate on our studies. Take out your composition book and start your five-minute journal.”
I lifted the lid of my desk and pulled out my journal and opened it. The date of the last time I wrote in it was just six days ago. I was surprised because it felt like I was gone a month. I sat there trying to think of what to write. I couldn’t lie, and I couldn’t tell the truth. I couldn’t write that I didn’t kill a hobo, and I couldn’t write that I was a witness of a murder. I looked up at the clock at the back of the classroom. Only one minute went by. Finally I decided to write what I knew about the Southern Pacific Railroad. I wrote that it goes from the Pacific Ocean across the U.S. to the Atlantic Ocean. By the time Capone rang her little desk bell, I wrote five pages. That was the most I ever wrote down in my journal and I don’t even remember writing it.
That school week went by in a fog for me. Capone caught me daydreaming a bunch of times. She didn’t say anything to me. Her fingers just squeezed my shoulder and hurt me back to work. One day at lunchtime all anybody wanted to know was when was I going to prison so I made up a date and told them, and after that everybody left me alone except for Danny and Marco and Little.
We didn’t hear back from Mr. Fullmer, and that just made things worse. I couldn’t think at school and I was way behind in my work. Capone made me and my mom meet with her after school.
When the bell rang at the end of the day, I stayed in my desk when everybody got up and left. They all looked back at me. I knew they thought it was about prison, but I couldn’t tell them the truth.
My mom sat next to me in front of Capone’s desk and Sister Alphonsus showed her all the missed work and bad test scores. Mom knew why and I knew why, but we couldn’t tell Capone. All Mom could say was that that she was going to take away TV on school nights and check my work every day. What Capone didn’t know was that I already didn’t watch TV on school nights and Mom always checks my work. Even though things were going bad, that’s one thing good: Mom wasn’t mad at me about school. And if she was scared they wouldn’t promote me to eighth grade next year, she didn’t show it.
I stopped going up to the club until Danny and Marco and Little came to the bedroom window one day. I was laying on Cruz’ bed reading a horror comic about a guy buried alive in a coffin when I heard meow and saw the three of them through the window screen. I told them to come in, but they stayed outside. It was Little who talked.
“We need to have a meeting in the club.”
I didn’t say anything. I just left the comic on the bed and met them at the side porch. Nobody said nothing until we got up to the club.
“When were you going to tell us what happened in the court?” Little asked me. He was laying on his back looking up at the sky.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I ain’t been at school and I guess I just needed some time to go by before I talked to you guys.”
Marco was sitting next to me.
“My mom says you’ll probably go to juvvie for a couple of years,” he said. “I don’t like that you’re the only one that’s in trouble but I’m chicken to tell the police I was there too.”
Danny stared at me but stayed quiet. I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest trying to think where to start. “Nobody except Danny knows what’s really going on,” I said to them. “All that stuff with the court don’t have nothing to do with the hobo.”
I saw Marco and Little jump a little bit when they heard that. I must have talked for an hour about Lawrence and the Turk. I told them the whole story just like I did to Dad and Betty and Ted and the lawyer. Just like I did to Mr. Fullmer and the lady with the machine. And just like to the people in court.
The story was always the same except for the bolt cutters. I still couldn’t think of a single thing else I ever left out. And my brain could still smell the B.O. and the poop in that dirty train station. I could see Lawrence’s shiny black face and caved-in mouth. When I finished the story I looked at Marco and Little. They looked shocked. And I was glad. That meant Danny kept my secret. I wasn’t surprised. I expected him to keep it. He’s my best friend and that’s a club rule. I was glad club rules were important to him too.
“Is the Turk going to jail?” Little asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “The deputy says they’re going to go after him.”
“I hope they fry that son-of-a-bitch.” That was Danny.
Little sat up. “So court wasn’t about the hobo?”
“Nah.” Then we were all quiet for a little while.
Little said, “That means they’re still going to come for us.”
But Marco said, “Why would they wait so long?”
Danny said, “Maybe they forgot.”
“I’m sick of waiting for the cops.” Little said. It could have been me who said that. That how I felt too. We all sat in the shade in the club for a while. Then Little stood up. “I’m going home. I guess we just have to wait some more.”
The other guys got up too. Marco told me, “I’m just glad you didn’t go to juvvie. I wouldn’t want you to be the only one.” I patted him on the shoulder to say thanks.
Danny was the last one to stand up. He slapped his pants legs to shake off the stuff that falls from avocado trees. “Well, I still think they forgot about us. I’m sick of worrying about it. I’m not going to wait anymore for them to come and get me.”
25
Grandma tells me life is one of God’s mysteries, and I believe her. It was a mystery how the date I told my class I was going to prison was the date I left for prison. Two weeks after the grand jury, Grandma got a telephone call. I found out because when I got home from school Betty was at our house and Grandma was crying like I never seen her cry before. More than at Grandpa’s funeral and more than when Rudy got sent back to prison.
Dorothy wanted to go to Grandma, but Ted took us to wait in the front room. Grandma’s bedroom door was closed but I could still hear the awful sound of her crying. She sounded like an animal that’s hurt real bad. Ted went into her room and Betty came out. She must’ve been crying too, because her eyes were all puffy, and her nose was red. She closed the door real quiet like when you don’t want to wake somebody that’s sleeping and came out to the front room. Dorothy asked Betty what was wrong. Betty sat down on the couch next to Dorothy and hugged her. She said, “Honey, we got some bad news. Uncle Rudy had a heart attack and he’s real sick.” She waited a few seconds. “The doctor told Grandma that it’s so bad he probably won’t make it.”
Dorothy scrunched up her face. “Make what?”
Betty pulled Dorothy’s head to her chest and started crying. When she saw me looking at her, she let go of Dorothy and wiped her eyes with a hankie.
Betty told her, “He’s dying.”
Dorothy turned to me with big eyes “Uncle Rudy’s going to die, Manny!”
Betty said to me, “Grandma’s very upset, so it’s better if you two stay out here until your mom and dad get home. Do you have any homework, Manny?”
“Just arithmetic and reading.”
Betty told me to start my homework and to call her if I needed help. Dorothy laid down on the floor and opened her Cinderella coloring book. I stayed on the couch and took my reading book out of my bag and opened it to a story I started reading in class about a Dutch boy who saves his town from a flood. Well, I heard he saves his town but I don’t know myself because I never got to the end. I was at the part where he’s walking along a road by a dike and he sees water squirting out of a hole. I tried reading, but I couldn’t get Rudy out of my head. I pictured him all bandaged up in the hospital like the time the Turk beat him up. I tried to understand how so much bad stuff could happen to one person. I thought about all the prayers Grandma says for Rudy and I wondered why God wasn’t paying attention to her. What was she doing wrong? Or if God doesn’t know Spanish. And what were all those saints supposed to be doing for her besides standing around in that glass case?
I heard my dad’s car come in the driveway and the doors slam. I shut my book and saw Mom at the kitchen doorway. I looked down at Dorothy. She was asleep on the floor with her arms crossed under her head on top of her color book. Mom asked me if I was all right and I told her yeah. She went into her room and came out with a blanket and covered my sister.
“Do you know about Uncle Rudy?” she asked me. I told her Betty told us he was going to die.
Grandma’s bedroom door opened and Dad came through the kitchen. He walked past Mom without looking at us and went into their room. He closed the door loud. Dorothy moved a little bit but stayed asleep. Mom went to her bedroom door. Before she went in, she said to me, “Don’t bother your dad. He’s upset.”
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go to Grandma’s room and I couldn’t bother my dad. I thought about going over Danny’s and telling him the news, but I thought Dad would yell at me if he needed me for something and I wasn’t there. I thought about watching TV but something told me now wasn’t the time for TV. I looked at my book. I didn’t care about the Dutch boy and the dike. All I cared about was Rudy.
Grandpa died after his stroke and now Rudy was dying of a heart attack. I used to think only old people like Grandpa had heart attacks, but I guess I was wrong. I wondered how a heart attack feels. How bad it hurts. If it was like how my heart hurts when Cruz is mean to me in front of other people. Or if a heart attack is really when a person does so many bad things that all his heart can do is hurt itself real bad. Or maybe a heart attack feels like there’s an arrow sticking in it. I thought about Rudy being in prison again and how sad he must’ve been to be like a rat in a cage.
I wondered why my dad was mad. I know sometimes he’s mad because he’s just mad but sometimes—like when he has a fight with Mom—he looks mad, but is really just sad.
I heard my parents’ voices in the bedroom. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but their voices sounded different. Usually when they fight, both their voices are loud. We can hear them all over the house. But this time, I could only hear my dad.
My mom’s voice was soft and caring like it was when Dad belt-whipped me for hopping the train and she tried to make me feel better. She wasn’t fighting with Dad. Dad was fighting with something else.
When the door opened only Mom came out of the bedroom. She came over to where we were and told me that Friday we would be going up north to be with Rudy. I asked her what hospital he was in and she said it was somewhere near Rudy’s prison. She said we would be missing school on Friday and Monday and maybe Tuesday because the hospital was far away.
Right away I thought about how much more school I was going to miss. I didn’t want to stay in seventh grade when Danny and Little would be promoted to eighth. I thought about the sixth graders in school behind me and how I only knew a couple of them besides Marco and how I’d have to make friends with younger kids. Cruz and his crowd would make fun of me for sure.
I asked Mom if I could stay with Betty and Ted but she said no, that Betty and Ted and Grandma were going with us and besides, Dad needed me to go. I didn’t get why Dad needed me, but I didn’t ask. While she was talking, Dad came out. He didn’t look at us but went back to Grandma’s room. His steps were slow and heavy, and he didn’t say a word. Mom told me to leave Dad alone for now.
26
When Mom woke me up Friday morning it was still night outside. I took a quick shower while Mom took off the sheets and blankets. I’m glad Cruz wasn’t there. He stayed overnight at his house, and he would stay there while we were gone.
When I got out of the bathroom Dorothy was sitting at the kitchen table. She was supposed to be eating breakfast, but she had her head down on her arms, and I knew she was asleep. I sat across from her. Grandma was dressed and at the stove making tacos like for Rudy’s court day. Mom poured coffee from the pot into the thermos Dad always takes to work. Mom shook Dorothy awake and told her that if she didn’t eat she wouldn’t have food again until lunch. Dorothy didn’t eat, so Mom threw her cereal down the drain and sent her to get dressed.
We were going in two cars. Dad and Mom and me and Dorothy would go in our car, and Ted and Betty and Grandma were going in Ted’s. When Dad pulled into the street, I looked out the back window and saw Ted follow us.
We took the Ridge Route and got to Bakersfield after three in the afternoon. When we stopped for gas, I found Bakersfield on the map Mom pulled out of the glove compartment. I had put a circle around Folsom and was drawing a line with a crayon to track our trip up Highway 99. I was already tired of being in the car, and when I saw how far we still were from Folsom, I was disappointed.
We gassed up and drove through Bakersfield. When we got to the other side of town, we saw a sign that said KERN RIVER and crossed a high bridge. I stretched to see the river, but it was too far down. Dad told us that when he was a kid, almost all of Sangra would go up north to pick crops in the San Joaquin Valley. They would camp by the Kern River for a couple of days going and coming from the pisca. Then he was quiet for a few miles.
When he talked again, he said, “I drowned in the Kern River.” Mom turned her body to face him. “What’re you talking about?” Dad drove another mile before he talked again.
“I was about your age, Manuel. A bunch of us kids went swimming in the Kern. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The water was freezing cold, but we didn’t care because the weather was hot. Families usually camped in the same spots every season, and somebody sometime had tied a rope to a high tree branch, and we would swing out and then let go and jump into the cold water.”
Dad said that some years the Kern would run real high if it snowed a lot in the Sierras the winter before. That year the river was so high, families had to pitch camp father back from the bank. The part of the river where the rope swing was tied was quiet but more toward the middle the current was swift. Dad said he remembered swinging and jumping into the cold water and then the current got him. Before he knew it, he got pulled underwater, then let go, then pulled back under. When he came up, he could see boys running along the bank trying to keep up with the current. He could hear the boys yelling for help and yelling at him. “Swim, Manuel!”
But he couldn’t swim, because the current was too strong. He felt his legs getting torn up by underwater tree branches. He swallowed a lot of water, and the cold burned his throat. He was getting tired fast so he tried to reach for tree branches or rocks or anything he could grab to stop himself. He was pulled underwater a bunch of times, and he said the roar of the water was louder than an SP train.
When he got a chance to see the bank, only Rudy and some other kid were running to keep up with him. But he couldn’t do anything while the river threw his body at one boulder after another. If he didn’t dro
wn, he said, the underwater rocks were going to beat his brains out.
“At that point, I wanted to die and just get it over with, it hurt so much,” he said. “But just when I was going to let go and let the river have me…” Then he stopped. He was looking out the windshield, and his head was real still. I looked out the front to see what he was staring at but there was just straight road. Mom touched his shoulder, and he kind of shivered.
“Just when I was ready to give up, something grabbed my arm. I felt my shoulder pop, and I was pulled underwater. The river wanted me, but whatever was holding my arm wanted me more. I breathed in cold water. The cold burned my lungs so bad I had to take another breath, and when I did, all I got was more freezing water.”
I could see Dad’s eyes in the inside mirror, and I saw them take a quick look at me before he looked back at the highway. He said, “You know, the Kern’s still a dangerous river even after they built that new dam up in the foothills, but before that it was even deadlier. The locals still call it the ‘Killer Kern’ because so many people drowned in it. I’ve heard stories about people getting swept away by the current and ending up fifteen, twenty miles downstream, all torn up from the underwater rocks and trees.
“I would’ve been okay dying there. My lungs were burning, and I couldn’t feel my arm—I found out later that my shoulder had been dislocated. I could feel myself going away. It was like a dream and a nightmare at the same time. It felt like falling asleep in a noisy place because all of a sudden everything was dark and quiet.
“When I woke up I was in a hospital room in Bakersfield.” Dad looked at me again in the mirror. “Your grandma and grandpa were there and a priest from Bakersfield. Your grandpa said the doctor told him he didn’t understand why I was alive. The priest even gave me the last rites. I guess I died. My heart had stopped, but the emergency room people brought me back. They said I was lucky my brother grabbed my arm and held on.
“I didn’t understand them at first. Then your grandpa told me Rudy was able to grab me and hold on until some men pulled me out.”
Iron River Page 15
