Muchacho Page 2

  Maybe those Indian kids will appreciate Beecher. Maybe they’ll like having a teacher that calls up their parents and comes to their house to shake their hands and sit on their falling-apart furniture to show how much she cares. Maybe those kids won’t break the windows in her car while she’s inside their house. They might even like her after a while. But we don’t like that kind of teacher here. We don’t need people feeling sorry for us. We need those hard teachers, the ones who know what it feels like to wake up hungry every day for sixteen years. The ones who catch you all by yourself in the hallway and grab your shirt and slam you up against the wall and say, “You’re such a fucking loser,” and then just drop their hands and shake their heads and walk away. Those kinds of teachers might be able to handle the truth if I ever felt like telling them, but I doubt if I ever will. What difference would it make if I did?

  CHAPTER 3

  BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM

  TODAY IN SCHOOL THIS NEW KID FROM OHIO SAID PEOPLE IN New Mexico are lazy because everybody on his street parks their car right up in their yard near the front door where you would have some nice grass if you lived in one of those green places.

  “I don’t see why they can’t even walk a couple steps to their door,” the stupid Ohio kid said, and I was going to explain that his neighbors might be lazy but probably that isn’t why they park in their yard because if they don’t got a handicap ramp and they park right in front of their door then they could be a dealer or some kind of gangster who doesn’t want to get shot trying to get from his house to his car or vice versa. But I didn’t tell him because Henry Dominguez already told him to shut up and go back where he came from if he didn’t like it here. The Ohio kid’s ears got all red and I felt kind of sorry for him because I don’t know how many times somebody told me to go back where I came from except I am where I came from and they’re too stupid to know it—even though everybody has to take American history and it’s right there in the book that a whole bunch of states used to be Mexico, like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. Like mi abuelo always says, “We didn’t cross the border, mijo. The border crossed us. The Corazons been living here for three hundred years.”

  When Beecher was here, we used to have some pretty good class discussions about stuff because Beecher was like one of those little sheepdogs that you see on the Discovery Channel where they don’t make any noise, but they keep all the sheeps going in the right direction and if one of the sheeps starts getting any big ideas and gets out of line, the little dog just bites it on the butt. But our new pinche dickhead teacher Mr. McElroy believes in democracy and it doesn’t work any better in our English class than it does in our government because only the real big guys get free speech and everybody else knows if they say what they really think who’s going to be waiting to whack them after class. McElroy tried to start a discussion about the border controversy after Henry told the Ohio kid to go back where he came from and the Ohio kid told Henry to go back where he came from, but as soon as McElroy asked for comments, T.J. Ritchie laid back in his chair and said why don’t we let those Minutemen who bring all their guns and sit on the border in their lawn chairs just get up off their asses and do what everybody knows they want to do.

  “If we just let those Border Patrol wannabes shoot the stupid Mexicans, then we wouldn’t have a border problem,” T.J. said. He doesn’t give a shit about the border, but he likes to get things started.

  “That would be murder, you stupid ass,” said Teeny White, whose mother is Mexican.

  “Those Minutemen guys are the ones who are stupid,” T.J. said. “I mean, I’m white and everything—”

  “You sure about that?” Henry Dominguez hollered, and the tortilla crowd cheered. But T.J. Ritchie doesn’t care if you say shit about him being white because he’s always saying there are two kinds of white people and he thinks he’s one of the good kind because his mother drags him to church all the time and he knows a whole bunch of quotations from the Bible. They’re mostly quotations about why it’s okay to hate other people like gays or Arabs, but if anybody reminds T.J. that Jesus didn’t hate people, he just says, “Oh yeah? I’ll pray for you to stop being so stupid next time I go to church.”

  “Those Minutemen are mostly those big fat dumb white boys who like to drive around the desert chasing down antelope and shooting them from inside their pickups,” T.J. said. “They call that hunting. Effing assholes.”

  Then a bunch of other white boys who cut school every year during hunting season said maybe they should have open season on idiots like T.J., and McElroy blew his whistle and gave us a spelling quiz. I kind of wished McElroy knew how to have a discussion because I had an idea when everybody was yelling. I was thinking what would happen if Canada decided they wanted to have more land, just like America did back when they invaded Mexico. I looked it up on the Internet. In our history book, it says “the Mexican-American War,” but in the Mexico history books it says “the United States Invasion of Mexico.” Anyway, so the Canadians just decide to take Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of those other cold states up there where all the lakes are. And they have to kick some butt and kill a bunch of people, but they win and then they put up this big fence and say, “Now this is Canada and you can’t come here and live unless we say so.” And some people would say, “But our family has lived here for three generations.” Or they would say, “My grandmother lives over there and I always visit her on weekends.” But Canada would say, “Tough shit. Handle it. And you can’t come here and work anymore, either, unless we say so. Even if you already worked here for years.” And Americans would say, “How come you’re acting so shitty instead of trying to get along with your neighbors?” But Canada wouldn’t have to answer that question because they already got what they wanted. And Americans would just keep on sneaking over the border because they would feel like nobody has the right to split up families or just take somebody’s land and say it’s another country and then Canada would get real pissed and say, “Okay, we’re making French the official language. How do you like them manzanas?” But probably if you tried to ask some Americans to think about my Canadian idea they would just look at you weird and tell you to go back where you came from.

  Anyway, all I’m saying is you should drive around the neighborhood at night and see if there are any cars parked in the yard right up by the front door before you buy a house in New Mexico, but if some new family is too stupid to figure that out then they’ll just end up freaking out and moving anyway, so it works out the same in the end.

  CHAPTER 4

  JUST SAY NO

  PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO GO AROUND TELLING LITTLE kids to Just Say No to drugs because that could be dangerous. Besides, Just Say No has to be one of the lamest ideas ever invented in the first place and I bet it was invented by somebody white who never had to sleep in the same bed with four other people who hardly don’t ever take a shower because there wasn’t anyplace else to sleep. If just saying no worked then people would go around just saying no to stuff they didn’t want to do anymore. Papi could just say no to being poor and unemployed. People would just say no to cigarettes and they wouldn’t have to pay all that money to get hypnotized into quitting smoking. And all those white girls wouldn’t be puking up French fries in the bathroom behind the cafeteria. And Bobby Chavez wouldn’t be dead. Bobby said no. Except he said no to the wrong guys and they popped him just like that. And then they put it in the paper that it was a drug deal gone bad, all insinuating that Bobby was buying drugs, which was the first thing that came to most people’s mind anyway because he was poor and brown.

  It didn’t matter that Bobby was president of the Spanish Club and the best player on the soccer team and made the honor roll every single time. They forgot all that stuff as soon as the newspapers said there were drugs involved when the incident went down. The teachers all made little speeches about how much everybody would miss Bobby, but you could see it in their eyes that they believed all those lies in the paper and what they really wanted to say was, “See what happens to you when you waste your potential and take drugs?” And even though a bunch of kids tried to tell them that Bobby wasn’t buying, nobody paid any attention to them. The police and the newspapers and the television reporters all commentated and speculated that Bobby got caught buying a little recreational cocaine and tsk tsk tsk what a shame because he had so much potential. Even that Latina reporter from the TV station down in El Paso sat there in her sharp suit with her hair that doesn’t move and pretended like she knew what she was talking about.

  That’s when I stopped reading newspapers and watching the TV news because those guys are supposed to be investigative reporters but even an idiot like T.J. Ritchie could have made a better investigation than they did. All they would have had to do was go to my neighborhood and stand on the corner and watch. And they’d see that black pickup with the black-tinted windows sitting right behind the bus stop. They’d see the bus pull up and all the kids start piling out the door and when the last couple of kids got off the bus, the door of that pickup would open and a real big guy in a black sweat suit with a black watch cap would get out and start walking behind those last kids. And the kids would walk a little bit faster and the blood in their ears would pound like that sound track from Jaws when the shark is circling the boat, getting ready to chomp their arms and legs off. And they’d see this one kid who was walking alone, like I made the mistake of doing a couple weeks after Bobby got popped. Then they’d see that big guy in the sweat suit grab that all-alone kid and put a gun up to his head and say, “Here’s the package. Here’s the address. Here’s the money. Deliver it or you’re dead.” And the kid would deliver the package because he wasn’t stupid enough to Just Say No. And the next day, that kid would get the message that if he didn’t show up on the corner and do another delivery, the cops would be knocking on his door to bust him for dealing drugs and they wouldn’t believe him if he told them about the black pickup and the gun because he’s a poor Mexican kid from a bad neighborhood, so the cops figure he’s theirs sooner or later and it might as well be sooner. And the kid would know that black truck would be waiting by the bus stop the next day, and he couldn’t say no to drugs, so that kid and his cousins would make a gang and he would never have to walk alone again.

  CHAPTER 5

  ME AND HARVEY CASTRO

  OKAY, HERE’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND HARVEY Castro who lives next door to me except it’s like we live on different planets. Harvey’s friendly and everything but we don’t hang together because he’s a senior at the regular school and I’m only a junior at the alt school. Plus, Harvey is from Nicaragua which doesn’t really matter except all the Anglo teachers think he’s Mexican because he has black hair and speaks Spanish. Most Anglos are like that but it isn’t their fault because they don’t get a very good education about us. In elementary school they probably learn the Mexican hat dance and color in the geography maps for South America and Central America and memorize where the coffee beans come from, but by the time they get to high school they don’t know the difference between El Salvador and Ecuador. They read about two pages in the history books and then they forget all about south of the border except for the tequila and the drugs and the mariachi dancers and the coffee. This one time, Beecher told us she bought this special fair-trade coffee that was picked by people in Ecuador who didn’t get ripped off by the big coffee companies. But I bet those people were still real poor because if they weren’t, why would they spend all day picking coffee beans for rich Americans who spend so much money on one cup of coffee that they could have bought five breakfast burritos instead?

  Anyway, Harvey is from Nicaragua so when he came here they put him in ESL class because he had a real big accent and nobody could understand him for about a year and after that they realized he was some kind of genius so they switched him to Advanced Placement where he has been kicking Anglo ass ever since.

  Harvey is short and round and everybody calls him Gordito but he has a mustache and a girlfriend who has been engaged to him for two whole years. I’m tall and skinny and I have about three hairs on my chin and the longest I ever had a girlfriend was for one week. I met Angela when I was working as a bagger at Kmart over at White Sands Mall and she worked at Chick-fil-A. I probably wouldn’t have even met her except we got off work at the same time and we both liked that bourbon chicken from the Chinese takeout. The first couple times I saw her, I didn’t say anything because she was too pretty to talk to. But the third time I saw her, she brought her bourbon chicken over and sat down at the same little table where I was sitting and said, “Hi, I’m Angela,” and after that she was my girlfriend.

  A couple days later, we were walking around the mall after work and Angela said she was cold, so I bought her a leather jacket. The next day, she said she didn’t want to miss my calls, so I bought her a cell phone. Then I didn’t see her at work for a couple days, so my cousin Graciela who is in the same class with Angela drove me over to Tularosa where Angela lives. When I knocked on the door, this big buff güero answered the door and told me to get lost and leave his girlfriend alone or he would mess me up good. I said what about all the stuff I bought her and he said, “That’s your loss, sucker.” He poked his finger in my chest, too, right in front of mi prima. I got so mad I drove like a maniac all the way home and I drove into a irrigation ditch and hit a little tree and broke it. Graciela had to go to the hospital but she was all right and she didn’t sue me or anything because she’s family and she felt sorry for me because it took me about six months to pay for that stupid tree. And now I have to walk or skateboard everyplace because Papi took my car away and gave me a bicycle which I wouldn’t ride if you paid me because then everybody would see that I’m a loser.

  Harvey Castro rides a bike. He rides it every single day, even when it rains, but he never looks sweaty and his hair doesn’t move. He has this kind of long hair that he combs straight back from his forehead and it never moves. I think it looks wack like those old TV game show guys but all the girls think Harvey is cute. That’s what they always say. “Ooh, Harvey is so cute.” And if the guys make fun of Harvey for being cute, he just laughs and says, “Do you want my autograph now while you can still afford it?”

  No matter what anybody says to Harvey, he won’t fight. He’s too smart to fight. In fact, he was going to be the valedictorian of his class when he graduates. I don’t even know if I’m going to graduate or not. It depends. But Harvey already has a scholarship to go to the University of New Mexico. He got invited to go to a bunch of other colleges, even some rich ones like Harvard, but he says he doesn’t want to go too far away in case his parents need him for something.

  Harvey should be the valedictorian because he has a 5.0 GPA on account of all his extra credits for taking college classes and being president of the student council and all kinds of community service stuff that he didn’t even have to do. The only time I ever did community service was when I got caught shoplifting. But last week, the principal at Rosablanca High called Harvey’s parents and told them that they should be so proud of their son for being number two. Now he’s the studitorian or some lame title like that. Even though everybody knows Harvey is número uno and he has the highest GPA, it doesn’t count because he was in ESL for a year and ESL credits don’t count the same as regular classes. So they took away being the valedictorian. Harvey’s mother called up my mother and told her all about it and I thought, Híjole! Watch out! because now Harvey is going to let them have it—but the next day he just walked around the neighborhood like normal. He didn’t even act like he was pissed.

  Henry Dominguez asked Harvey was he going to sue the school and Harvey just laughed and said, “It’s just high school. It doesn’t really matter.”

  That’s the real difference between Harvey and me. Things don’t matter to him like they do to me. I would of burned down the school or at least tore a toilet off the wall in the bathroom. But that’s why I’m in the alt school and Harvey Castro isn’t even though I used to get straight A’s before I started being a juvenile delinquent. Harvey’s parents are poor just like mine, and he’s the oldest kid just like me, and he’s Catholic and his father kicks his ass just like Papi does mine, so how come Harvey’s so cool and I’m so hot? How come he just walks away from fights and does his homework and gets a college scholarship and I flunk biology and attract fights like mosquitoes on a summer night? Is it in my genes? Or did my parents do something wrong? Or am I just who I am by accident?

  I used to think I was messed up because of being a sex offender in the second grade. I wasn’t really a sex offender but that’s what the school labeled me after I kicked my teacher in the crotch. I didn’t mean to kick her in the crotch, neither. I was just trying to get her to let go of my ear. She was this real mean little teacher who used to twist the boys’ ears all the time, anytime we did even the littlest thing wrong, and sometimes when we didn’t even do nothing. She would just grab your ear and twist it until it felt like she was ripping it right off your head and we would all cry, even T.J. Ritchie, because it hurt real bad. And this one day, I had a ear infection and I even had a note from my mother saying I shouldn’t have to take gym class and that teacher knew I had a ear infection but she twisted my ear anyway. I yelled at her to stop but she wouldn’t. And I tried to hit her but my arms were too short. She just held her arm out straight and practically picked me up off the floor by my ear. So I kicked her. I wasn’t aiming at any special place. I just kicked and my foot went right between her legs.