Chapter 23

Afterward

Mom and Dad pulled into the driveway around noon.

Segis, feeling responsible, had shown up around ten o’clock and tried to apologize. In all honesty I never really blamed him for anything other than just being his trusting, innocent, simple self. You could no more blame a soccer-playing kid in the third-world for stepping on a landmine and losing his leg, and the legs of a friend. More to the point, Segis meant nothing by it. And later, he meant even less.

Mom and Dad listened to our story, and Dad grabbed my chin and forced my head this way, and that way, and then up, to see what was disfiguring, what would mark, what was permanent.

All the blood vessels in one eye had burst; my mouth was so swollen, I couldn’t speak without first spitting.

While this was terrible to deal with, what hurt most was the look on my mother’s face, as she studied me. She was half ashamed, half accusatory, like she, too, believed I somehow deserved it, probably for drinking at home, with Richard. But I was accustomed to this response, from Mom.

What was really terrible was the offers of pity I received from Gina, the girl I had fallen in love with, whom I had dated for like, three weeks, and really liked, but didn’t realize I felt totally outclassed—at the time, I had just felt weird, strangely nervous, but couldn’t figure out why—until eventually I realized it was because I couldn’t meet standards, as a boyfriend. I had nothing to offer her. Which didn’t stop me from falling further in love with her, as adolescent boys do. That’s why the Cure had meant so much to me, at the time, because of Gina, with all its sweet bitterness, the soundtrack for the lovelorn. And when I finally got her on the phone to tell her what had happened, she paused, asked me to hold, and then came back and said her dad, the very reverend Judge Hinojosa, had offered me a place to stay, if I needed it, and I thanked her, and knew enough to feel totally humiliated, to be completely ashamed of where I came from. And always very grateful to him for the offer.

Dad had listened to me and Segis with obvious disgust, frustration. He was going out of his mind with rage by two o’clock. He was vengeful and horribly ashamed in that machismo way at the possibility of impotency, that he could not protect his family, yet again, even after Richard had threatened his life.

The sheriff’s department was called, and another morbidly obese deputy had driven by around one in the afternoon, saying there was nothing he could do now, should have called when it was happening. Dad went inside the house and came back with a photo of Richard and the deputy’s boss, the High Sheriff Alex Perez, arm in arm, with two other drug dealers, drinking beer.

“Oh,” said the deputy. “That guy. Riche,” recognizing Richard.

After he left, Dad turned on both Segis and me. “Why didn’t you both gang up on him, at once? You two together? Kicked his ass!”

Segis answered, “Well, because of respect,” he said, confused. “He’s Domingo’s uncle . . . ”

Dad hissed at this, cursed. Spit and nearly punched Segis himself.

I had a better answer: fear. Richard would have killed us then, if we had fought back. This was a man without an Id in those ten minutes. He was unchecked, insane. Anything we would have brought against him, he would have turned on us, double. We were kids, dealing with a werewolf on cocaine. This isn’t hyperbole: He would have killed one of us, or both. Dad’s macho pride wasn’t there to see it.

Dad called Dan, who was living in Seattle at the time with his friend Dennis, and made Dan feel like this was his fault. Dan felt horrible, and I got on the phone, told him it wasn’t his fault: There was nothing anyone could do. Richard just spiraled out of control. Dan was relieved to hear me speak, I could tell.

Eventually, Dad got so wound up, he worked up his courage and drove off in the Taurus, infuriated, but quiet. Mom tried to stop him, knowing how something like this could turn out. She loved him still, at this point. She did not buy into this barrio drama machismo bullshit, with knives and guns. Mom was America.

But Dad didn’t listen to her and he went looking for Richard, like he’d been expected to do all along, like it had been scripted.

Every ounce of courage was summoned and Dad drove off knowing he was now getting into a fight that had been building since Richard was brought home as a one-year-old in exchange for a pair of brake pads, a muffler, and a four-barrel carburetor.

Richard had shoved Dad into a remote corner of the nest, and Dad now had to prove himself against the neighborhood bully, his own stepbrother.

We all held our breath, and the guilt I felt was crushing, bringing this unconscious resentment in the barrio to a head once again.

Richard, in the meantime, had quickly converted to a fundamentalist hyper-Pentecostal church group that happened to be leaving for Michigan that morning, to work in a diner washing dishes and helping build more evangelical churches for the poor along the way.

Beating me, and having to own up to it, had been a mystical experience. He’d found Pentecostal Jesus, who spoke in tongues and snake venom. So he boarded the van and had been gone by three o’clock that next day.

And his cowardice, his hollow shallow crust of a fighter had crumbled that day, when Dad chased him from house to house, from hideout to hideout, and his biological family had lied to my Dad to keep Richard safe, hidden, and then put him on an Econoline headed north. And when Dad came home again, unbloodied, untainted, and safe, he was bigger to me and Mom, because nothing had happened. That was civilized.

After that, Dad never quite re-integrated with the barrio. He had already been feeling a sort of drift—nothing he’d ever mentioned, or quite been able to place, but after this, all his friendships went cold and he never really tried to pursue them. Richard, when he returned over a year later, caught Dad in a Christian logic riddle, and apologized to him in such a way that Dad, now also a good Christian, was forced to forgive him and had no choice in the matter, like they were competing players in Dungeons and Dragons. But Dad never forgot what Richard had done.

Richard continued to live a remarkably miserable life. He married an “elder sister” in the church he’d joined, who already had three kids, and he added two more.

Then he moved on, and married again, this time with two more kids added to the original assembly of the third wife. He became diminutive, shrunken, defeated. Absent of joy.

His one source of delight eventually became the love he rediscovered from his discarded boy, JP, the kid from his first wife who’d called that Father’s Day and I’d hung up on.

JP had learned all the mechanics of every sort of truck, from the gasoline engines of the 1970s to the thirteen-geared diesel engines of the long-haul tractors. School was never a problem because he just never went: JP’s life had always revolved around trucks, and by the time he was twenty years old, he was making a good living working as a long-haul driver. He could drive like a Minotaur, to hear everyone tell it, driving cross-country and making enough to keep his dad happy. He did this just to get the approval and attention of his father. With checks that big, he certainly got a lot of both.

JP had forgiven all and had spent his every waking hour hungry for the attention of his Pa; his real Pa, Richard.

And now, flush with cash and a shiny new pickup, JP managed to get back in Richard’s orbit, and things were going well for them. Richard had found a renewed joy in his abandoned son.

They would go out on the town like pals, like equals, and one night after they were out drinking late, JP dropped Richard off at the trailer park where his third or fourth family was housed, and as he was driving home drunk, JP fell asleep at the wheel of his shiny new pickup and was killed on a bare South Texas highway, had the good luck to run into the only tree for miles around.

“It’s sad,” my own father called to tell me.

I waited a moment before I answered.

I wanted to say, “No, it isn’t. Fuck him. I’m glad that Richard lived to see his abandoned son die.”

But I didn’t say it. At least, I hope I didn’t say it. It suddenly dawned on me that the reason JP called that day was because he had been reaching out to the father who had abandoned him, on Father’s Day. Richard’s response had not been about Gramma at all, but about his guilt, his failure at being a father.

Anyhow, Gramma had had a life insurance policy taken out on JP, like she had on all the young men of the barrio, myself and Dan and Derek included, without any one of us or our parents knowing. JP’s death was like winning the lottery. Again. She made $15,000 out of it, gave his family $1,000 to help bury him, and $2,000 to Richard, to help ease his suffering.

I tried to feel something after I ended the call with Dad. I tried to feel horror, pity, disgust. Satisfaction. Ran my tongue over the chip in my tooth.

I felt nothing.