I never forgot him for one day, though. I let all that fire-and-brimstone feeling sink down deep inside of me, so I’m swimming in it. I was looking up at the sky from the bottom of a lake, through all this black water. And it got so that I could see that llorona in the mirror and not feel scared no more, even if she jumps out and tears me with them wicked teeth. Well, chingado. I’m the one biting bloody now.
It was a cold California Saturday, the kind when there ain’t no rain or no clouds but the air’s sharp blades sticking you when you’re outside, that they saw what I could do. Don’t you mess with me or my own, I showed them. Cause you won’t wanna pay my price. I can hurt you in the soft little place you didn’t even know you had.
I remember every minute like it was yesterday. It’s a late foggy morning and I’m trying to cool out by kicking my feet up on my table and rolling Marlboro smoke rings off my tongue like Dolores Del Rio. I’m all alone just the way I like it. I don’t got to make nice to no jefe or landlord over chicas. I had a spell to sit there thinking my own thoughts. It was peaceful almost, a cigarette in my fingers and time on my hands, listening to the leaves rustle outside my window and the far-off holler of morning TV, but it don’t last. I’m not dreaming there ten minutes when I get jangled by these vatos who start screaming down the street.
Hey man! I hear them outside. Órale! some loco yells, and it sounds like he’s real close by. Their noise makes me sit up straight and bend my ear so I can hear better. Chique rushes me then, banging down my door with her two fists like the war’s coming. “This better be good,” I say when I open up, and she’s standing there looking chistosa, her permed hair funky twisted from the wind and her big red lips yelling at me how we got to go down to Garfield now, that she found out my shooter man.
“Some Lobos got his baby brother Mauricio down at the school, Lucía,” Chique tells me. I feel her hot breath on my skin and even though it’s so cold her face is sweaty, but then I can’t feel or see nothing. What she say? Baby brother. Baby brother, I keep thinking it over in my head. I know that name. I used to know it.
“All right, ésa, check it,” she says, and it’s like she’s trying not to jump out her own skin. “Montalvo caught this little C-4 tagger crossing out Lobo sets at Garfield and when he gets to beating on him, the baby starts going on how the Lobos better watch it cause he’s Chico’s brother, and how Chico will kill all of us, that kind of shit. ‘He’ll kill you and your women,’ he says. Like that one he took out at the rumbla. The one he shot in the back.
It takes me a minute, but then it hits me solid in the chest. The vato that started the whole thing finished it too. “We’re gonna talk straight up, Lucía. I hear there ain’t no other Lobo who’s got it together.” That’s what he told me through the crack in my door and I felt full of spice and flame when he said them words. Then he’s fighting Manny at the rumbla and after Beto takes over you couldn’t see nothing but arms and legs bending and the blur of faces. There was the sounds of guns popping and the pounding of the Bombers running up by the benches and so I’d raced off, leaving my Star Girl to try and kill the loco that took out her Ghost man, her with them weak hands she had and she couldn’t hold the gun right, but Chico don’t show her no mercy. He just walks up while her back’s turned and puts a clip right in her spine.
“How you hear this?” I ask Chique, filling out that C-4 blank face in my head. Halfie fuck. Greaser rubia hair like a girl, pinkie skin that can’t take no sun. You’re a strung-out white boy can’t do your fights fair, eh? Can’t walk away like a man. Got to go and bang on my chola cause you can’t hold tight. Old Chico. That’s the vato I’ve been dreaming about, and I know him too good. I knew you when, boy. When you was nothing. “How you hear?” I say again, but mostly so I hear my own voice out loud. I’m standing there in my doorway but it feels like my heart ain’t even beating.
“Girl, you’re gonna be the last Lobo to find out,” Chique says, pulling my arm and making me get in my car. “I guess there was some homeboys around and word’s spreading in the neighborhood like wildfire.”
When I got there, after screaming on over to the school like a dragracer and jamming on all the reds, I looked around to see what my battle was gonna be. I’d have to be careful, cause once a man goes down in this neighborhood it seems like everybody hears electric fast at the same time, and I knew the C-4s would be racing over here to help out their jefe’s baby brother as soon as they got wind. “Good thing, eh?” I said to Chique when we set foot on asphalt, eyeballing the playground for any badasses. But I didn’t see any Bomber locos yet. There’s just a crowd of Lobos far off, standing in a circle and looking down. Montalvo, Rudy, Madball, Dreamer. I see some of them have red warrior bandannas sticking out their pockets like blood roses, but now they look as still and timid as schoolteachers. And there’s some sheep on the sidelines, keeping their mouths shut but playing nervous with that fried hair of theirs. I even see Manny waiting on the outside as usual and wearing his loser hangdog face.
I can’t make out what they’ve got there. I figure it’s that Mauricio beat up bad on the ground cause they ain’t kicking or laughing at nothing, only keeping their shaved heads bent. Watching. It’s quiet as a cloud. There’s still a little baby blue morning color in the sky so nobody’s out yet, and you can’t hear a peep coming from the vatos. Nothing was coming from baby brother neither.
More Lobos show when I start walking up to that little circle. Beto comes around, and I see Chevy and Wanda driving up. Rocky and Tiko and Popeye are coming through the gate behind me. Even Cecilia’s racing on in and beelining for Manny. “It’s gonna be hot, ésa,” Chique’s saying next to me, and my heart starts steamrolling cause I know I’m gonna get that C-4 back after all this time.
“What you homeboys up to, eh?” I say, my voice breezy. I’m making my way up there slow the same as a big head would instead of running and flapping my hands like a henpecking woman, and I’m still keeping a lookout for any sign of C-4. “What up?” I ask again but nobody’s talking. I don’t get one sign from them till I get real close and then Dreamer looks up at me, and he don’t have no buffalo to him right then. He’s wearing this face as ragged and thin as worn cotton, and from the pinch of his eyes I see how he’s fighting down shame.
I push them open and see this red-colored beat-up kid bent up double on the ground like babies do in their mamas’ bellies. His shirt’s scraped off, his arm’s twisted the wrong way, and there’s that yellow tagging paint on his open hands, capping his fingers. I can’t make out his face, but that vatito looked right, dark like I remembered, and he wasn’t more than nine or ten even though his head’s half buzzed clika style and he’s got a Bomber tak scratched on his bony boy chest. He looked like Chico’s. But he’d took it bad. From what I can see of his skin, already blue and purple in places, there’s some stripe cuts bleeding down his ribs and slashing up his neck and face. I know them marks. He got them from getting kicked when he was already flat down. This puppyboy was whipped worse than any full-sized loco I’d ever seen except for old dead Ghost, but he still was breathing. I see his lips flutter up like they’d caught a breeze.