“Eddie, get out of bed,” she called. “Oatmeal’s getting soggy.”
The puppy’s neck had been twisted so severely that its dead eyes were staring back at its haunches. Its body lay on the patio next to a scattering of dead leaves. A stain on the carpet and the smear on his father’s polished shoe told the story.
“I asked you to start picking up after your dog!” the old man yelled. “Now pick up your dog. Trash bag and shovel are waiting for you.”
His dog’s name was Bandit. Eddie had carried him home on his bike from the store, made a house out of cardboard and towels, snuck him in at night, and let him chase his toes under the covers. He tried not to look at the creature, whose only crime had been reliance on Eddie. Tears filled his eyes.
“Don’t you dare cry, boyo,” his father said. “Dog’s a lesson. Everything gets taken away.”
The house breathed pain. The wrongness of it stopped Eddie cold at the back door. Bandit must’ve sensed its threat too.
The dog sniffed and nipped at Eddie’s shoes, growling defensively as he tried to get past.
Eddie bent down and stroked Bandit’s fur, overcome by sadness at what was to become of his little friend. He thought of how the spade vibrated as he tamped down the dirt around the trash bag. He picked the dog up and pressed his face into its fur.
It took a moment for the significance of the gesture to register.
Eddie knew the horror show that awaited him inside. He was eight years old again, home from a half day of school with plans to dump his bag, snag a juice, and get gone.
He remembered the frigid blast of air-conditioning that froze the sweat on his back and legs, the gurgle of the fridge, and how the light from the boxed windows formed a floating cage across the kitchen. He saw the empty whiskey bottle on the table and his father’s gun belt slung over one of the chairs. He passed quietly through the light bars, aware that a low keening had interrupted the preternatural stillness.
It was coming from the end of the hall, his parents’ room, where Eddie found his father choking his mother blue. The old man was sitting astride her on the bed, still dressed in full uniform. Beneath him, his mother’s naked body writhed. She snorted for air, blowing snot and blood in an arc that reached almost to the ceiling. Her arms and legs pinwheeled and her bony ass bucked off the mattress.
Eddie remembered standing there, transfixed, doing nothing.
But in his memory he had not stopped to pick up the dog. Something had changed. For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past. He stepped out of it. Instead of walking through the kitchen, he went to the table and lifted his father’s gun from its holster.
The automatic was heavy. He held it two-handed, the way his father had demonstrated: Got to hold firm on those jigs. Eddie carried it like that down the hall, Bandit at his heels the whole way.
Eddie didn’t stop at the bedroom door this time. He raised the gun. “Get off her.”
The old man spun around, surprised and angry at Eddie’s transgression. “Do yourself a favor, boyo,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, undo it. Pronto.”
“I’m trying.”
“You must be stupid sick—” The old man stopped when he saw the gun. “What in the fuck-all name of Christ are you thinking?”
“Ending you.”
Eddie backed away as his father rolled off the bed. His mother didn’t move. “So that’s your plan? You’re going to shoot your own father?”
“Y-Yes,” Eddie said.
“R-R-Really? You fucking whelp. I own you.” Booze fused with rage in the old man’s eyes. “Are you listening to me? You’re mine. I made you. Now drop that gun. Do you hear me?”
Eddie didn’t hear. He was twenty years away, in a courtroom, staring down the black-cowled judge. He again felt the scorn of that penetrating gaze and the righteousness of the single question the judge had posed. What made you?
“I know,” Eddie answered, and snapped back to the old man. He fired three times, center mass. His father’s face vanished in an explosion of smoke and gore. Eddie wondered if his sentence was over.
He’d served his time. Done life.
PART II
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
AMAPOLA
BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA
Paradise Valley
Here’s the thing—I never took drugs in my life. Yes, all right, I was the champion of my share of keg-gers. Me and the Pope. We were like, Bring on the Corona and the Jäger! Who wasn’t? But I never even smoked the chronic, much less used the hard stuff. Until I met Pope’s little sister. And when I met her, she was the drug, and I took her and I took her, and when I took her, I didn’t care about anything. All the blood and all the bullets in the world could not penetrate that high.
The irony of Amapola and me was that I never would have gotten close to her if her family hadn’t believed I was gay. It was easy for them to think a gringo kid with emo hair and eyeliner was un joto. By the time they found out the truth, it was too late to do much about it. All they could do was put me to the test to see if I was a stand-up boy. It was either that or kill me.
You think I’m kidding.
At first, I didn’t even know she existed. I was friends with Popo. We met in my senior year at Camelback High. Alice Cooper’s old school back in prehistory—our big claim to fame, though the freshmen had no idea who Alice Cooper was. VH1 was for grandmothers. Maybe Alice was a president’s wife or something.
You’d think the freak factor would remain high, right? But it was another hot space full of Arizona Republicans and future CEOs and the struggling underworld of auto mechanics and hopeless football jocks not yet aware they were going to be fat and bald and living in a duplex on the far side drinking too much and paying alimony to the cheerleaders they thought could never weigh 298 pounds and smoke like a coal plant.
Not Popo. The Pope. For one thing, he had more money than God. Well, his dad and his Aunt Cuca had all the money, but it drizzled upon him like the first rains of Christmas. He was always buying the beer, paying for gas and movie tickets and midnight runs to Taco Bell. “Good American food,” he called it.
He’d transferred in during my senior year. He called it his exile. I spied him for the first time in English. We were struggling to stay awake during the endless literary conversations about A Separate Peace. He didn’t say much about it. Just sat over there making sly eyes at the girls and laughing at the teacher’s jokes. I’d never seen a Beaner kid with such long hair. He looked like some kind of Apache warrior, to tell you the truth. He had double-loops in his left ear. He got drogy sometimes and wore eyeliner under one eye. Those little Born Again chicks went crazy for him when he was in his devil-boy mode.
And the day we connected, he was wearing a Cradle of Filth T-shirt. He was staring at me. We locked eyes for a second and he nodded once and we both started to laugh. I was wearing a Fields of the Nephilim shirt. We were the Pentagram Brothers that day, for sure. Everybody else must have been thinking we were goth school shooters. I guess it was a good thing Phoenix was too friggin’ hot for black trenchcoats.
Later, I was sitting outside the vice principal’s office. Ray Hulsebus, the nickelback on the football team, had called me “faggot” and we’d duked it out in the lunch court. Popo was sitting on the wooden bench in the hall.