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by Everett Saucedo
I hit the glass doors of Circus Pizza pretty hard. They swung back and smashed against their frame, and for a second I thought I had shattered the panes. No one noticed except two kids sinking quarters into a Skill Crane. They looked at me for only a second before turning their attention back to plucking morsels out of the stew of stuffed animals and plastic wristwatches. I looked for Jav.
illustration by Kelly EdwardsHe was in the arcade, huddled in the cockpit of Afterburner. His black Chicago Bulls jacket was turned inside-out with the red lining facing outward. I thumped the cockpit with my fist. He pretended not to notice, so I kicked it, this time hard, so hard I chipped the plywood gameshell, and crawled into the seat of the Star Wars game beside him. Over the screams of electronic jets being disintegrated by sidewinder missiles and birthday-party guests snapping whips of Skee-Ball tickets, I could hear sirens.
"On the count of three," he said, "get up and go into the bathroom, take off your jacket. Leave through the back entrance. I'll meet you in the spillway in a few." I stuck my head out and scanned the dining room. A family was singing Las Mañanitas to their five-year-old kid, and the Skill Crane kids had given up and were now bopping plastic alligators with foam mallets.
"Did anyone follow you?" he asked.
"I didn't look."
We walked down the spillway while he munched on a slice of pepperoni swiped off the birthday table. "What I like to do," he said, "is to take a can of motor oil, pop it open and toss it into a swimming pool. As the can's sinking, the oil oozes out and makes this big slick. Gets into the filtration, fucks everything up. Careful dude, dead dog." I looked down at my left Chuck Taylor about to go into a dog that must've been there a month. Its skin was already well mummified onto the bones. It was almost summer and there'd be no rain for two months. The dog wouldn't have the dignity of decomposing; he'd just stay there under the sun and continue leatherizing until a guy like Jav came along and kicked his head off, which he did. The head snapped off sharply and rolled down the channel.
"If they have a garden hose out front, stick one end into an open window. Then let `er rip. Lime's good for burning designs into lawns. You can use salt, but that takes too long. Lime's fucking instantaneous. Remember when I drew "FAG" with lime on Bobby Marquez's lawn?"
"I wasn't there."
"Well, you should've seen it."
"Jav?"
"Yeah bro?"
"Where'd you get sodium from?" In the darkness, I couldn't tell if he smiled numbly or scratched his shaved head, the way he always did whenever I asked him a real question. Probably both.
"I was pulling detention with Diaz a couple weeks ago. Fucking retard left the room for a Coke, and while he was out, I opened the chemical closet, grabbed the jar, and walked out at five-thirty. Wavy fucking gravy, man." Jav ditched class the day Diaz took a sodium sliver the size of a chewed-off thumbnail and dropped it into a beaker of water. I was in class that day, and told him all about what happened, about the purple cloud that reared up like a potted cobra and the water that instantly boiled over the beaker's lip. He wouldn't stop asking me the specifics for a week -- how much water Diaz used, the size of the experimental slice, the location of its mother, slumbering in a jar under a blanket of mineral oil somewhere in the chemical closet. Sometimes I should just shut up in front of Jav.
The moon hung high over the desert, making things brighter the further we got from the houses. We'd been walking for a half-hour, and even though I've walked this channel many times before, it felt like Jav was leading me to another world, his Planet Hideout. The moonlight transformed everything into a weird, alien negative. Blue and red plastic balls washed downstream from the play cage at the Circus now came in only two colors, grey and greyer, and a dirty pink doll's head shone like fine porcelain until Jav stepped on it and caved it in.
"Question," he said. "Why the fuck can't I beat the Gate Boss on DoomStar's third level? I tried shooting off the arms and waiting for him to blink, but the fucker never blinks. By the time he does, I'm out of missiles --"
"Jav --"
"Didn't you find the warp tunnel to get around him?"
"Whose house was that?"
I didn't want to do anything that night. After we came back from Luby's, I was looking forward to beating level four on DoomStar, a feat that, if successful, would take all night, before going to bed. I didn't expect Jav to knock on my window, telling me to meet him outside wearing something dark. He stopped walking and turned his back to me, his head smooth and grey like the plastic balls at our feet.
"No one's."
"No one?" I asked. "No one who has a swimming pool and a satellite dish?"
"What do you care, man? We've done this before -- what's so different about tonight?"
"I almost got hit by a truck running across Colleary to catch up with your ass. I think I'm entitled to know who we just did."
Jav picked up a Coors bottle lying on the ground and threw it hard against one of the spillway walls. It exploded all over the red eight-foot high calligraphic letters "VWC": Varrio West Colleary. Funny thing is, the varrio east of Colleary Avenue wasn't much of a barrio, unless you consider perfect lawns, blue Ford Tauruses and two-story brick homes typical of inner-city Hispanic neighborhoods. But I still wouldn't fuck with them. Next to the letters was a huge painting of the business end of a hand giving the finger. On the other wall was the mark of their main rival, VGL -- Varrio Gateway Lopez.
I remember both for December 21st last year. That day, the last school day before Christmas, rumors of a big fight got passed around like so many origami-folded love letters. Supposedly, a VGL banger keyed "VGL" into the car door of a VWC member. Skirmishes broke out that day, but were mere tremors before the Big One. Everyone, including the school security guard, assumed the student parking lot was ground zero, but the action happened in the teacher parking lot. Me and Jav saw the whole thing. A member of VGL ran by us from behind the library. It was Manny Alsup; we were in Cub Scouts together. Fourteen or so guys in red -- VWC -- ran after him. As soon as they swept by, another swarm, this time of VGLs, ran by, and both sides poured into the teacher parking lot. By the time the police showed up, Manny was on the ground with a crowbar dent on the bridge of his nose. Jav threw a brick through a library window in the confusion.
"Teresa Medlar," he said. "That's whose house that was."
Teresa Medlar? She was two years older than us and on my wall by sheer accident. A Polaroid snapshot of me and Jav taken our freshman year during a winter band competition is tacked up on my wall. Neither of us is smiling. I have my cape wrapped around me, and Jav has hair, thick wooly curls, and is cradling his gleaming trumpet like a machine gun. Teresa's head, all brown curls and honey skin, is floating over my shoulder; she may not have known her picture was being taken, but her eyes did, and they're pouring themselves right into the lens. We didn't place that year, and me and Jav quit that spring.
"Teresa Medlar?" I said, "What the hell did she ever do to you?"
"It's not about me, man," he said. "You know who Tina Ramos is?"
"No."
"She's Terror's girlfriend." The name's Terrace Winfield to his guidance counselor, psychiatrist and parole officer, but Terror to the rest of us. Colleary High was his tank, and he was the lone shark; guys like me and Jav were just mackerel trying to stay out of his way. Terror's arm was the one who buried the crowbar down into Manny's face. He spent that Christmas in the county juvenile home. I wanted to scream at Jav, ask him what the fuck he had gotten himself sucked in to, but he wouldn't stop talking long enough. "This Teresa bitch's been talking shit about how she and Terror are fucking on the side. So Tina finds me and tells me she wants Teresa to pay. Tina's also planning to beat the shit out of her real soon. This is just the fucking appetizer." I suddenly felt nauseous and fell to my feet, throwing up what little remained undigested. "Know the best part of all this? Tina asked me to do this. How about that? I'm a sophomore and I'm already a name. Dee-fucking-facto. I just think I spent my last Friday night playing Nintendo with your sorry ass." I threw up again. Jav laughed some more. "Dude, what's up with you tonight?"
"How'd you find out where Teresa lives? She's not in the phone book or the student directory."
"I asked Bobby Marquez. He told me Teresa lived on his street and pointed out the house."
"You trusted Bobby Marquez with something like that?"
"Bobby's a good guy, even if he's a fag."
"Jav, you got the wrong house."
"Don't bullshit me bitch," he laughed.
"Jav, I've been to Teresa Medlar's house. I had to go to her house every Wednesday during the summer for section practice. I'm telling you that's not her fucking house." He stopped laughing. I guess it was unfortunate for him that I was the only person he took seriously. "She doesn't live anywhere near where we were."
I followed Jav to the stop of the spillway. He faced the city and stared into its light, orange from all the sodium vapor lamps. His lower jaw trembled a bit, like tremors before the Big One.
"So if that's not Teresa's house...." He said no more and kept on staring. His mind was processing the same facts and rumors that mine was, weaving from them a tapestry of horrifying possibilities. The house was west of Colleary. Stories circulated in the halls on Mondays after the weekends about Terror's wild pool parties. Bobby Marquez knew it was Jav who drew FAG on his lawn -- I told him. And he must've noticed the red Chicago Bulls jacket, exactly like Jav's but in reverse, with a black lining, hanging on a chair by the pool Jav hurled half a pound of sodium into. That could've been it. And it could've been the home of a very unlucky elderly couple.
We crossed Colleary around 1:00am. We didn't speak, even when we crossed the thick stream of purplish-black liquid flowing downhill into the gutter. When we got to my house, Jav finally spoke and said he'd be by tomorrow to watch me beat the fourth level of DoomStar, then walked on home. The three of clubs card wedged between the bedroom door and frame was still there. I turned the Nintendo on and started to work on the fourth level. The trick is to get at least 100 missiles and blow up the left turret that fires exploding scattershot fireballs first. You'll need at least a hundred missiles; consistency is everything.
